


Something the Riddler Would Never Do

by iammemyself



Series: Arkhamverse [27]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Batman: Arkham (Video Games), Batman: Arkham - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, M/M, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:34:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25715875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iammemyself/pseuds/iammemyself
Summary: Edward made a promise to leave Gotham behind, but after Jonathan has recovered enough to travel he realises doing so would be a mistake.  After setting himself the task of catching Gotham’s new, fear-toxin-wielding vigilante, Edward is forced to face whether he has what it takes to move on and leave the Riddler behind forever.The original female character is Sabrina, his lawyer.
Relationships: Jonathan Crane/Edward Nygma
Series: Arkhamverse [27]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/647603
Comments: 2
Kudos: 45





	1. The Breakup

**Author's Note:**

> There is some French in this chapter, but don’t worry about trying to read it. I basically repeat it again in English. Also, my written French is middling so if people want to correct me I don’t mind. If you haven’t read any of the other fics in the series, I’ll try to catch you up briefly in the A/N but you’re also free to ask if context hasn’t provided enough info for you.

**Something the Riddler Would Never Do**

**By Indiana**

**Characters: Edward Nygma, Barbara Gordon, Jonathan Crane, Ada (Riddlerbot OC), Sabrina (OC)**

**Synopsis: Edward made a promise to leave Gotham behind, but after Jonathan has recovered enough to travel he realises doing so would be a mistake. After setting himself the task of catching Gotham’s new, fear-toxin-wielding vigilante, Edward is forced to face whether he has what it takes to move on and leave the Riddler behind forever.**

* * *

**The Breakup**

“You’ve been avoiding me,” Jonathan said.

Edward ignored him. 

“I’m willing to put up with _some_ degree of childishness from you,” Jonathan continued, “but you’re approaching the point of too much.”

Edward did not answer. If he did he would lose the count and have to start over, and Jonathan would not understand why that was important. Even if he would, explaining it would be… difficult.

“If it were resentment about having to take care of me,” Jonathan went on, “that would be understandable. A bit petty and unfair, seeing as you knew what you were getting into when you whisked me from the GCPD, but –“

“I liked you better when you stared at me _silently_ ,” Edward snapped, throwing down the lug wrench with a satisfying clatter. He’d been _trying_ to put new tires on Jonathan’s damn truck, but the nuts had to be turned seven times each exactly which was more difficult than it sounded. This one had gone six and a half times, which was wrong. He needed to do it again.

“My observations are concluded,” Jonathan said. Edward looked up at him in exasperation. The light from outside barely made it through the smudged and clouded windows of the abandoned automotive garage he’d taken custody of two weeks ago, so not much of Jonathan’s upper half was visible. The lower was taken care of by the halogens Edward had set up on the ground around the truck. For what must have been the twentieth time he was resoundingly disgusted by the sight of Jonathan’s bare ankles inside of his scuffed sneakers. They had once been white but were now about the colour of underwear a year or two past replacement. Everything about that thought made his skin crawl and he looked back down at the tire in front of him.

“ _Observations_?”

Jonathan was leaning against the side of the truck’s front end, barely not in the way of the tire Edward was working on. “You’ve been at that one nut for a while now.”

“I like doing things right. Does that offend you?”

“Right is relative.”

“So you _want_ the tire to fall off while you’re driving.” He stared at the offending nut and reached into his back pocket for his cigarette case. Seven. He lit one and put it in his mouth, hoping it would make six and a half seem less important.

“I don’t have any reason to believe it will.” He could _feel_ Jonathan’s expectant stare. “Not like you do.”

“Do you have a point?”

“I’d like to know just why you’re so hell-bent on doing… this to my truck,” Jonathan said. His shadowed brows came together it what had better not have been annoyance. “If it _is_ my truck.”

“Of course it’s yours,” Edward snapped. “Do you think I restore forty-year-old pickup trucks for my own entertainment?”

Jonathan shrugged. “It would explain how you know how to do it.”

“Vehicles are just puzzles, Jonathan. They only go together one way.”

“And if you’d said we were going to Alaska, I’d be able to understand why you’ve done all this work on it,” Jonathan said. “You’ve spent almost every moment since…” He paused and looked up, as though some invisible sign above him held the answer. “… since we got here, I imagine, taking my truck apart and putting it back together again as though it were essential you return it to brand-new condition.” 

“It _would_ probably kill you to be _appreciative_ , for once, wouldn’t it.” He tossed the end of the cigarette out of sight.

“I didn’t ask for you to do this,” Jonathan said evenly.

Edward scowled up at him.

“Don’t pretend you’re doing me a favour when it was always a personal distraction.”

Edward stood up. “Since you know all of that what, pray tell, was it a distraction _for_?”

Jonathan’s gaze was level. “It would be remiss of me to guess. A lot must have happened while I was ill.”

Oh, things had happened all right. But Jonathan didn’t care about any of it. He just wanted to finish his analysis and move on with his day. Like Edward couldn’t. “I’ll be done tomorrow,” he said, standing up. “Then we can leave.”

“No,” said Jonathan. Edward paused in his removal of his work gloves.

“No?”

“No,” he repeated. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

Edward threw the gloves into the truck bed, exasperated. “You couldn’t have told me this two weeks ago when first you started _staring_ at me all day? Or were you merely waiting for me to finish so you could drive off into the sunset with a truck that I so graciously restored for you?”

“I couldn’t have,” said Jonathan, “because I had not decided until now. You’ve changed, Edward. And your refusal to so much as think about it is indicative of a deeper problem that you don’t seem willing to solve.”

Edward snorted. “So my behaviour was fine when it benefited you and your plans, but now it isn’t because it doesn’t? Tell me, Jonathan, are you _truly_ concerned for my well-being or have you just recently discovered I may not be quite so under your thumb where we’re going?”

Jonathan, surprisingly quickly and with unexpected strength for a man of his frailty, snatched Edward’s left arm and held his hand up between them. Edward looked at it, but Jonathan was watching his face.

“Neither,” Jonathan said. “It’s _this_ which troubles me.”

Edward wrenched his arm back and stuffed his hand into his typing glove. “It’s nothing,” he snapped.

“That is most definitely not _nothing_.” Jonathan crossed his arms. “And I know it’s not eczema, either, so don’t try that one.”

“I didn’t realise you had a minor in dermatology, Jonathan. At least you have something to go into now that your psychiatric reputation is shot.”

Jonathan was staring across the garage in the general direction of the wall hidden in the darkness. “Do you know what the most frustrating thing about my short-lived stint as a therapist was?”

“People expecting you to have empathy for their pathetic, easily solvable problems?”

“Oh yes,” said Jonathan, “but alongside that there was the expectation that, by seeing me once a week, it would somehow magically _fix_ all of those problems. No work, no effort.” He rubbed one side of his jaw. “You see, Edward… you cannot help a person who is not prepared to accept that help. You can tell them what the problem is and how to fix it and you can do this in incredibly minute detail… but if they are not ready, it’s all pointless.” He was staring at Edward somewhat pointedly as he said this. He ignored that and ensured the seams of the gloves were in the right places.

“Until you are ready to do something about your disorder,” Jonathan went on, “I don’t think you should be going anywhere.”

Edward looked up from his hands.

“What are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

Jonathan, of all people, should know he didn’t have… _that_. “You’re mistaken.”

“Didn’t your lawyer argue in court that you _did_ have it and subsequently get you moved from Blackgate to the Asylum on the grounds it was illegal to hold you in solitary based upon your condition?”

“What she chooses to present in my defense has nothing to do with me. She probably delights in irritating me with contrived diagnoses, much like everybody else. Including you.”

Jonathan took a long breath.

“It’s time to face it, Edward.”

“There’s nothing to face!” Edward spat, every muscle tense. His hands were clenched, though he didn’t know why. It wasn’t as though Jonathan were able to fight him. “It’s nothing! But you’re insisting on making something out of it regardless!”

“Edward,” Jonathan said, “you have –“

No conscious thought drove Edward to press Jonathan into the cab of the truck. “Don’t say it,” he said in a low voice, Jonathan’s orange plaid collar bunched into his fist. Jonathan, to his ire, did not look threatened at all.

“Why? Because if I do you might actually have to think about it?”

“No, because I’m _sick_ of being _analysed_ by every bozo who stumbled into a psych degree.” His breaths were heavy. “You still haven’t mastered spelling, have you.”

“I’ll let that slide this one time,” Jonathan said, mostly emotionlessly, but Edward could not identify what the rest of it was with the adrenalin erasing his thoughts. “Now I’m asking you nicely to let go of me.”

“Why? Does it bother you to know you’ve lost your power over me?”

“You know,” Jonathan said, glancing to his right, “I daresay if you looked in that mirror you would almost think it were your father standing here instead of you. The similarities between the two of you are uncanny, aren’t they?”

He couldn’t have released Jonathan just then even if he’d wanted to, and he had no intentions of wanting to anytime soon. “Take it back!”

Jonathan shook his head. “You see, Edward? You have too many truths left to face. Admit it. You’re a wreck. And in case you were unaware, alcoholism is thought to be genetic. So. Tthere’s no doubt you’ll be taking that last step soon enough.”

A heady strength had him pressing Jonathan into the driver’s side window so hard Jonathan actually winced, which was… oddly satisfying. With Edward’s other arm crushing his ribcage, he soon wouldn’t have the breath to continue speaking the disrespectful words he was taking so much pleasure in poisoning Edward’s ears with. “Shut up!” he shouted.

Jonathan was holding something up between them, pressed inside of his right index and middle fingers. Edward glanced at it. It looked like straw. His mind was racing too much to identify it, though he was sure he knew what it was. He’d seen it before.

“Let go,” Jonathan said, his voice quiet but firm. His glasses had slipped to the end of his nose. Edward looked down at the… it was a toxin ampule. He shook his head.

“You won’t. Not this close to yourself.”

Jonathan spoke nearly in a murmur. “You know that I will.”

Everything in him told him that Jonathan was lying and that Edward should keep him here until he had taken back his disrespectful slander, but there was the niggling thought that Jonathan had never lied to him. Worse, it wasn’t just a thought. It was the truth. But if this was the truth, then everything _else_ was the truth also, and that –

He threw Jonathan to the ground and stormed some distance away. Jonathan always told him the truth, but he couldn’t be this time because what he had said was wrong. It was all wrong, all of it! So Jonathan _was_ lying, but why? Why would he lie now when he had always made a point of telling the truth?

There was an acrid burning in the back of his throat, and he coughed. It didn’t help at all; in fact, it made breathing even _more_ difficult. He fell to his knees, his bronchitis turning up in full force as the burning wended its way into his lungs, and he was dimly aware of the fact that his hands, too, were pressed to the ground. It was hard to think over the realisation he was choking on something, somehow, and when he opened his tearing eyes to the telltale orange mist he knew immediately what it was.

Jonathan had broken the ampule.

What little breath he had was seemingly threatened by the pounding pulse in his throat, and even though he knew intellectually that was an illusion some irritatingly primal part of his brain insisted there was something inside of his trachea and that he was going to choke to death. He could not stop coughing. He laid on his left side on the ground, eyes pressed closed and started counting.

When he had regained enough of himself that he could think again, he sat up, retrieving his glasses from where they’d fallen off in front of him. His breathing was not quite normal, but it would be soon. Wait. He recognised this floor. Frowning, he looked up. What he saw was… unexpected.

It was the living room in the house he had lived in between the ages of eight and sixteen. It looked exactly as he remembered: a desk fitting neatly into the lefthand corner, an L-shaped purple couch tucked into the right. The triangular wooden coffee table, folded closed, with the stacks of magazines underneath it was pressed into the usual spot at the angle of the couch. Behind him was the television set ensconced in a large wooden stand, which held also an assortment of video cassettes and audiovisual equipment, and the upright piano that was always draped in a sheet. To complete the scene was his father, sitting in the couch’s attached recliner, reading… he squinted at the title. A French aerospace science journal.

None of this made any sense. 

Well, no. It _all_ did – though he didn’t _recall_ seeing his father ever pick up any reading material whatsoever – but what _didn’t_ was that this scene inspired no fear in him at all. Was the toxin merely too old to work properly? Jonathan hadn’t used ampules in the last twenty years. If he’d gotten it from the collection of garbage Edward had removed from the truck –

“ _Bonsoir,_ _Édouard_ ,” said his father. It had been so long since he’d heard his name pronounced that way he almost didn’t process it as being his. 

“ _Bonsoir_ ,” he said finally, getting to his feet. His father closed the journal over one hand and looked at him. He still could not stand the fact they had the same face and looked away.

“ _Je veux te demander quelque chose,_ ” his father said. Edward frowned. His father had never been one for conversation, much less had he ever been inclined to _ask_ for his input like he was now. 

“ _Qu’est que c’est?_ ”

“ _Pourquoi tu mens toujours sur moi?_ ”

 _Lie_ about him? Edward barely ever brought him up at all, and when he did it was to recount the honest truth about his father being a brutish, violent moron. “ _Je ne mens pas._ ”

His father gestured to the coffee table. “ _Regarde sous la table._ ”

So Edward looked more closely at the stack of magazines under the coffee table, all of which seemed to be… more engineering journals, mostly relating to aerospace. “ _Ils ne devraient pas être l_ _à.”_ He had to be hallucinating. On top of the hallucination he was already having, that was. He _did_ remember there always being magazines under that table, but surely they hadn’t been what he was looking at now. 

“ _Non,_ _É_ _douard_ ,” said his father, “ _ils étaient toujours là. Tout ça vient de ta mémoire._ ”

That was true. Edward’s hallucinations under fear toxin _were_ always pulled from his memory, and they were always accurate. So there _had_ always been engineering journals under the table, and he had just…

Now wasn’t time to figure that out. “ _D’accord, o_ _ù_ _veux-tu en venir? Une pile de journaux ne fait pas de moi un menteur. Tu es toujours un cretin brutal._ ” There had to be some point to this. His father was _not_ absolved from being a violent idiot just because he had some technical magazines stuffed into a coffee table. Edward was not unwilling to lie about some things, but _that_ he had _always_ told the truth about.

“ _Ta vérité,_ ” his father said, “ _n’est pas toujours correcte._ ”

His truth wasn’t always right? What sort of absurdity was that? His memory was _flawless._ His father was merely attempting to make him doubt himself, as usual. “ _Tu te trompes,”_ he said through gritted teeth. “ _Tu l’as toujours été._ ”

“ _Non_ ,” said his father, opening the journal again, “ _c’est là que_ tu _as tort_.”

Of course he would say that. He always thought Edward was wrong, but he wasn’t! He was always _right_! He put a considerable amount of effort into being so! And he was _especially_ not wrong about the kind of man his father was. How could he be? His father had taken the time to literally beat it into him. He opened his mouth to refute him, but the vision had gone and he was standing again in the garage next to the pickup truck. Jonathan was staring at him with an odd expression on his face. As though something had happened that he had not been expecting. “What?” Edward snarled.

“You were speaking French,” Jonathan said. Edward rolled his eyes and realised he could taste blood. He pressed his fingers under his nose. The toxin had made it bleed. He sighed in exasperation and pulled out his handkerchief.

“Yes, Jonathan,” he snapped in irritation. “My parents are French.”

“You’ve never mentioned that.”

According to the view of himself in the truck’s lefthand mirror, he’d gotten as much of the blood off his face as he was going to with this dry cloth. “What relevance does it have?”

“It must be extremely relevant,” said Jonathan, “else the toxin wouldn’t have made you speak French.”

He folded the handkerchief three times, but it felt wrong so he shook it out to do it again.

“What _did_ you see?” Jonathan asked, in a gentle but eerie voice. This distracted Edward from the count, which only made him even _more_ frustrated. Crushing the handkerchief into his fist, he snapped,

“You no longer have the privilege of asking me those kinds of questions.” And he turned around so he could _finally_ get this damn kerchief folded and into his pocket.

“What?” Jonathan asked from behind him.

“We’re through.” Why were his hands shaking so much? “You don’t get to dose me with toxin and then psychoanalyse me and pretend it never happened.”

“Edward, you were threatening me with violence!” Jonathan protested. “What did you _expect_ me to do?”

Truthfully, he hadn’t thought that through at all, but it didn’t matter. Jonathan should have known better. “I let go of you, didn’t I?”

“You don’t want to hear it,” Jonathan said, “but there is something _very_ wrong with you.”

He turned around, handkerchief still not folded. “There is not!”

“Your behaviour is incredibly disproportionate to the situation at hand,” said Jonathan. His eyes were serious, but not yet cold. “Which tells me that something happened at the GCPD. There was a complication. An event. But you won’t tell me what it was.”

“Because you don’t _care_ ,” Edward snapped. “What’s the point in telling you when it doesn’t matter to you anyway?”

“You _are_ aware that you have become _impossible_ to talk to.”

“You want to know what happened, Jonathan?” he asked, extending one finger towards him. “Think about what’s missing.”

“Missing?” Jonathan asked, frowning a little. “I don’t believe anything to be – “

“Really,” Edward interrupted. “So you _haven’t_ noticed that my children aren’t here.”

Jonathan looked in the direction of the other side of the truck as though he expected one of them to appear from behind it. Edward shook his head.

“ _That’s_ why I didn’t tell you. Because it doesn’t _matter_. You don’t _care_.”

“Edward, I –“

“Shut up,” Edward said, crouching down to pack his tools back into the bag so he could get the hell out of there. “You don’t care. You’ve _never_ cared. It doesn’t matter to you where they are or what happened at the GCPD. You don’t even remember their names, do you.”

“I do,” said Jonathan. Silence, and then: “Where _is_ Alan?”

Edward dropped the wrench he was holding. His heart was suddenly pounding against his ribs. “He’s dead.”

“I’m sorry,” Jonathan said, and Edward hated that he had gone to the effort of trying to pretend he meant it. 

“No you’re not,” he muttered, picking the tool back up and shoving it into the bag. “You’re glad he’s dead. I know you are. You hated him.”

“That doesn’t mean I wished him to be _dead_ ,” argued Jonathan.

“Of course you did.” Articles collected, he pulled the strap of the bag over his shoulder and stood up. “That’s the kind of person you are.” He stormed past him towards the entrance of the garage.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m not telling you that.”

“Edward, this is _not_ a good idea.”

“Why?” he asked over his shoulder. “Because you know you won’t last much longer without me? Because you were hoping I forgot that you need me far, far more than I’ve _ever_ needed you?”

“No,” said Jonathan quietly. “Because you seem on the verge of a breakdown and you will not get out of it on your own.”

“I am _not_ ,” Edward snapped, “and even if I _did_ have one, which I can assure you I would never do, I am far more capable of handling myself than you seem to think.”

“If this is what you want, I will respect it,” Jonathan said. “I just want you to be aware it is a bad idea.”

“ _You_ think it’s a bad idea.”

“We can talk about why I think that.”

“Why? So you can manipulate me into sticking around?”

“No,” said Jonathan. “So you have a chance to think about the decision you’re making.”

“I have,” Edward said. “Goodbye.”


	2. The City

**The City**

\- 

He had been leaning on the bridge’s railing, smoking, for a long time. 

He had no idea _how_ long. He was trying not to think too hard. It was easier than it should have been, because his thoughts had become disconnected a while ago and it was easier to let them whip through his mind than it was to attempt working out why they were there. The only one really present was that he needed to _quit_ smoking, as opposed to what he was doing right now, but it was paradoxically the only thing that made it easier to breathe. It was potentially what was causing the strange and constant tightness in his chest, but he didn’t believe it to be. That felt different when it was caused by the bronchitis, which had only been turning up in the morning as expected. No, this was… it had something to do with his randomly firing thoughts. He would be able to figure it out if they calmed down. But to make them calm down he needed something to focus on, something to _do_ , and he didn’t have that right now. The truck had helped but that avenue was now closed to him. Why had Jonathan had to break that ampule?! It hadn’t _caused_ this, but surely it was intensifying it. That was what it did, after all. It tricked the mind into reacting to a stimulus that did not exist. 

Because Edward had been threatening him. He had gauged Edward’s unpredictability to be so dangerous that he needed to be neutralised even after Edward had let him go. There was nothing about this line of thought that he liked. Particularly not the end of it, where he was forced to admit that Jonathan had been right. Edward had had no conscious reasoning for what he had done. His every action had been borne of instinct. The implication – that he, despite his undeniable genius, was as privy to the whims of primal chemicals in his brain as anyone else – tightened his chest further. He already knew how many cigarettes he had left, but he opened the case again to look anyway as he had done twice already since the last one. There were five. He needed one but could not have one because that would leave four, and though he knew _how_ to deal with that something was preventing him from doing so. He pushed the case back into his back pocket and draped his arms over the railing, tapping his left thumb against it five times. Now what. He’d been waiting for Jonathan to get better, so he had restored the truck. Now the truck was restored, and Jonathan was… up, but Jonathan no longer wanted to go. His plans were ruined. Of course they were. Jonathan didn’t care about his plans. All Jonathan cared about was that Edward did what _he_ wanted, which for some reason now involved him admitting to having a condition he absolutely did not have. Yes, the shrink Sabrina had forced him to talk to had concluded he had obsessive-compulsive disorder, but the whole point had been to get Edward moved out of Blackgate! It wasn’t as though they could have stood before a judge and argued he was schizophrenic or dissociating or had been struck with crippling, solitary confinement-induced depression. They’d simply picked the simplest yet hardest to prove explanation. It was smart. That was why she had been on the top of his payroll for so long. But it didn’t _mean_ anything. It was an excuse they had come up with and that was all.

Well, if Jonathan did not want to go to Canada with him then he would go alone. It was Jonathan’s loss, after all. He was better but he wasn’t yet well. The border was a mere six hours away but Jonathan could walk for barely six minutes. He wouldn’t make it on his own, but why should Edward care? If Jonathan was just going to insult him and make insinuations from now on, good riddance. 

He had promised. 

Edward removed his glasses with his right hand and rubbed at his face with his left. He couldn’t leave just then anyway. The plan had been to drive Jonathan’s accursed truck up there, so Edward was now in need of a car. Therefore he had to go to his one remaining apartment to get the money. And his suitcase was still in the unfinished office tower. He wouldn’t be able to leave for a couple of days at least. 

He replaced his glasses and turned to face the nearest end of the bridge. Having a plan had calmed his thoughts and his breathing both. All right. The apartment was some ways from here, but given his extreme distaste for taxis – anything from sex to murder was more than likely to have sullied the back seat – he would have to walk. That was fine. He needed time to think about his next steps anyway.

As it always seemed to be in Gotham, it was overcast with the ever-looming threat of rain. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to make his way across the city on foot, and it also wasn’t the first time he’d questioned how many more people could be packed onto this island. Especially once global warming came along to nip along its shores as was already happening in far-off Florida and neighbouring New York. The outskirts of Gotham, where he was now walking away from, were not quite so packed as the core of the city, but the farther inland he went the more impatient people there would be shouldering their way through packed sidewalks. It was the main reason he wasn’t concerned about being recognised. Even if he had been wearing something more elaborate than his current purple chinos and green wool jacket, anyone who looked at him would have been much more concerned with wherever they were hurrying to and whomever was impeding them from getting there faster than with doing a double take. Aside from that was the fact that most Gothamites were just too stupid for it to occur to them that a wanted criminal would be so bold as to walk down the street in broad daylight precisely _because_ they knew they wouldn’t be recognised. They _should_ have, but they wouldn’t. They saw only what they expected to see, and he was not one of those things.

Idiots.

After about thirty minutes he stopped to have lunch, which ended up being a tuna sandwich on a roll. Once he had provided his instructions for how it was to be made, he went into the bathroom and cleaned the rest of the blood off his face with his handkerchief. He didn’t even know who to blame for that. Jonathan had caused it, obviously, but most people did not get nosebleeds from fear toxin. It was possibly from the smoking, since that did negatively affect the sinuses, but it could also have something to do with having been punched in the face so many times. It was honestly a miracle that the greatest damage from having his nose broken repeatedly was a deviated septum. Other than the randomly occurring pain, that was. But he was no stranger to ignoring that.

He leaned against the outside of the building while he ate his sandwich, carefully watching the people walking by. The people who looked at him appeared mostly to be confused as to why someone was standing outside eating a sandwich in January. Those of them that didn’t scowl at him for daring set his eyes upon them, that was. Women in particular were starting to get testy about that, which was obviously not going to stop him. He was going to look wherever he wanted, thanks very much.

It took another twenty minutes to complete the walk to the apartment, the unit of which he was leasing not being much farther than the front door of the building. He usually preferred a room with a view, but when one was planning on being out-and-about frequently, it was best to minimise the time spent getting in and out of the place. He was the current tenant of the third unit on the ground floor, though he had only been here once: to install the electronic lock on the door. Typically that was not the sort of thing the landlord permitted, but Edward was of course not a typical tenant. 

The lock was important because he could not carry a set of keys around, so he required an electronic lock that only he knew the passcode to. Just in case someone were tempted to inspect the numbers for signs of fingerprints with which to guess the code, it also required live fingerprints in order for the numbers to even register. Unless someone were willing to stand there and break the door down, the unit was fairly secure.

He opened the door and squinted in the dark for the lightswitch, which was on the righthand side. In the now-lit room he was now reacquainted with the layout: foyer with closet also on the right, leading into the kitchen which transitioned sideways directly into his office. The walls beyond those were separated with an entryway about four metres wide, behind which was the bedroom on the right with attached bathroom to the left, the remaining space on that side being a hallway that led to a small patio. It wasn’t anywhere he would want to spend very much of his life, but it would do for now. 

He removed his coat and shoes to the closet and walked into the office. It wasn’t anything fancy either: six monitors connected to a custom PC in a nondescript black case, tucked neatly beneath a serviceable black desk with three drawers each down either side. In front of the monitors was a touchscreen laptop, currently closed, which he had mostly for convenience. There was a second desk perpendicular to that one, identical down to the computer underneath, which had only one monitor. That one was mostly intended to backup surveillance footage and not much else. It would serve in a pinch if the primary one happened to fail, which it wouldn’t.

All right. The first order of business would be to answer all the messages he’d been ignoring over the last couple of weeks. ‘Ignoring’ was a strong word, though. They’d sort of… slipped his mind. That was very unlike him, he could admit, but he _had_ had bigger things to think about.

Still. The mere sight of several hundred unread messages was exhausting. He filtered by the ones flagged as important, which left him with forty-one. That was a good sign. Well, it was until he read the first one. He frowned at it because it was so confusing. It claimed his automatic payments had been stopped due to insufficient funds. But that was impossible! This had to be spam that had slipped through the filter. He hadn’t updated it in quite a while, so it was possible phishing techniques had gotten more sophisticated in the meantime. And that one could have been. But the next four, all of which said more or less the same thing, couldn’t possibly have been. That was just too many. He folded his arms. This made no sense at all. He reached back down for the mouse and logged into one of his bank accounts.

Overdrawn. By the maximum allowable amount. But how? Had his information been stolen beyond his notice? He traced the list of transactions with one finger held just away from the monitor. No, he remembered all of these. Well, perhaps the other ones were a mistake, then.

But no. They were all overdrawn and he remembered all of the payments listed alongside the accounts. While he was looking through the third one he realised that none of them had any money going _into_ them; all of it was instead moving _out_. His income was mostly from working the stock market or plain old-fashioned stealing from bank accounts at random, and come to think of it he actually couldn’t recall having done either of those things in several months at least. If not closer to a year.

The last account said much the same things as the first four, which he had come to expect, but he had to be sure. Truth be told, he was becoming a little anxious. One of the most important cornerstones of his surveillance network was that his informants always, _always_ got paid, no matter where he was or what he was doing. That was what made them so loyal. His reputation as a reliable employer had been put on the line with this sudden stop in payments for the last two months. Well, no matter. He would pull the funds from his retirement investments and make up some excuse as to why he had been late, and then –

There was no money there, either.

He took a long breath and turned away from the monitor, leaning against the desk. It was gone. It was all gone. And not because it had been stolen, but because he had spent everything and had not even _attempted_ to keep track of his expenses in over a year.

_You don’t want to hear it, but there is something very wrong with you._

He glanced at the screen over his shoulder as though he’d subconsciously thought it would change while he wasn’t looking, which of course it hadn’t. The last of the money in his investment fund had been pulled six months prior. He was having trouble coming to terms with the fact that he’d done such a thing even as his mind was racing through all the points in time where he did, in fact, remember doing it. And he remembered, too, telling himself this was only temporary, that he would put it back next week, that he had enough left he didn’t need to worry about income right now, that this task was the most important thing in all the world and the money was inconsequential because he could easily procure more.

Thankfully, the last part was true. He just needed a few hours to get into the server of a bank and pull a few dollars from personal accounts at random, disguised as a service charge. Most people never checked that sort of thing, and the amount that did would have the charge reversed by the bank and that would be that. He knew how it went. He’d done it before. He didn’t _like_ doing it – he was definitely able to construct plans beyond the simplicity of this one – but it _was_ a bit of an emergency.

He spent about an hour trawling the news for reports of banks that had had digital security breaches recently. There had been one, a smaller institution than he’d been hoping for, but it would do. The next step was to locate the engineers for the banking software and find the one most likely to pull the sort of thing he was about to blame on them. That was a little more difficult, but he did find one of them who had for some reason listed his personal Twitter on his LinkedIn account. And what a gold mine of intellectual bankruptcy it was! He actually thought pineapple belonged on pizza! Ha!

That task took another few hours. He needed enough to cover the payments he’d missed and the overdrafts with some left over to live on and to use in the stock market, but not so much it would be incredibly suspicious. No need to worry, however. He was paid up for the year on this apartment and tomorrow he would start in on the day trading. That was incredibly time-consuming, but it was by far the easiest and fastest way to rebuild his finances. 

He was quite hungry by now and though he knew there wasn’t likely to be anything in it, he walked over to the stainless steel refrigerator and opened it. It contained only a box of baking soda. The freezer overtop held a tray of ice cubes, which was not only a bizarre discovery but a suspicious one. If someone had aims to poison him, they needed to try a little harder: he had long ago made a policy never to drink water sourced from Gotham if it had not at least been boiled first. He thought about putting it in the sink to melt, then decided merely to leave it. He probably wasn’t going to be using the freezer anyway.

He closed the door to the refrigerator but he got the feeling it had been done wrong, so he opened it to do it again. Yes, that was right. He did it a third time to make certain, which it was, and turned around. Come to think of it, it had been a _long_ time since he’d cooked anything. The most he’d done in the last several months was –

 _He was sitting on his bed with one foot folded into his thigh and the other parallel to the edge of the bed. He had in front of him a plate holding three sandwiches and a pile of sliced cucumber, and Alan had come in holding a cup._ What kind is that? _Alan asked._

_He swallowed before he was quite ready to, putting down the half of the sandwich he was holding. “Tuna.”_

What’s tuna?

_“It’s a fish.” He drank from his water bottle in an attempt to remove the lump in his throat. “Where did you go?_

_Alan’s handing him the cup was decidedly… anxious._ The other one was a little congealed.

_He should have taken it the first time, but now would have to do. He looked up at Alan, hot chocolate in both hands, and –_

Not right now.

He stared at the wall for a moment, then took a breath and resumed his previous thoughts.

Usually he had someone else go and collect his groceries for him because he was too busy, but seeing as he wasn’t at the moment he could just do it himself. Besides. He was going to have to once he’d left Gotham behind, he might as well start getting used to it. No car meant he’d have to walk, but this apartment building was located nearabouts a mall which included a supermarket as an anchor tenant so it wouldn’t be far. He went into the bathroom to wash his face properly and while he was doing so thought about what he was going to need now and what could wait another few days. He was dimly aware of the thought that he needed to shave, but right now wasn’t the time for that. He was unsure as to why he’d gotten so inconsistent about doing it in the past several… months… He frowned. 

There seemed to be a fair few things he should have been doing that he hadn’t for quite a while now. But Jonathan couldn’t be right, could he? No. 

He was usually very close to it, though. Perhaps his age was catching up with him at last. His skill with psychology more often than not allowed Edward to mentally put aside that it was just about the only thing he was good at, but without that Jonathan did not have much. In fact, he didn’t have anything. Oh, without Edward he would be able to machinate himself into some position or another that enabled him to hang on to what was left of his life for a few years longer, but even Jonathan could not will his circumstances away this time. Wherever he managed to go would find his body giving up on him before long. His lifestyle had always been best described as ‘neglectful’, and if there was one thing old age did not forgive, it was neglect.

He paused in the drying of his hands, which meant he had to start over again. He couldn’t allow that to happen. Jonathan’s fate would not be to end up in a corner, abandoned to die. If it were, Edward would have simply left him there. But that was a problem for later, seeing as there was no way Jonathan would apologise for his ignorantly erroneous words and Edward was not in the mood to forgive him.

He pulled on his gloves and then went into the foyer to get dressed to leave. He momentarily considered checking in the hall closet for a scarf, but decided against. He’d already been outside all day and hadn’t needed one.

The sidewalk had seemingly been plowed by someone very disinterested in their job; the salt was supposed to be spread evenly over the concrete but had instead been deposited in intermittent piles, as though the operator of the plow had stopped every few hundred metres to respond to a text or the like. Edward was conflicted as to which outcome he preferred. He was of course unimpressed with a city employee as lazy as this one, but he also did not like getting salt on his shoes. He would acquire some boots once he’d shored up his bank accounts. Currently he had on steel-toed shoes which, while lacking in the versatility to coordinate with anything, were a fair bit better than the dress shoes he had in the closet.

It was late, so the parking lot to the mall was not notably full. There was the usual smattering of persons milling around the bus stop halfway between the grocery store and the main entrance, two of which were engrossed in the contents of their shopping cart. It contained six reusable bags and a twenty-four pack of toilet paper, and one of the two old women inside of the bus shelter was eyeing it as though blaming it for something. There was one other man standing about a metre away from them, smoking and scowling down at his phone. He could feel the weight of the cigarette case in his jacket suddenly. He couldn’t now. Not just because he was walking towards the entrance of the store, but because there were five.

The doors slid open as he approached them, and once had walked through them and lifted his eyes to what the store contained, something prevented him from walking and his thoughts suddenly scrambled away from him as they had been doing on the bridge. The only one that was really coherent was, _How am I supposed to count all of this?_

Coherent was a matter of perspective, obviously, since that thought made no sense at all. Why would he _want_ to count everything in a grocery store? Why _did_ he want to? Why was it difficult to breathe, suddenly? 

“Hey, buddy,” snarled someone from behind him, snapping him out of his temporary paralysis. “You mind?”

His thoughts were such a mess he couldn’t do much more than step out of the way of the doors. He closed his eyes for a moment. That had been… strange. But irrelevant. He was tired and had been for… a while now. Whatever had just happened was probably something to do with that. It didn’t matter, anyway. He was fine now.

He opened his eyes to see he was looking at the floor, within the sight of which was thirteen floor tiles. The tension in his chest eased. Yes, he was all right now.

Sort of. Every time he had to look up from his feet, it came back. He had rarely ever desired a cigarette so much in his life, and both of those combined with the maddening rush of his thoughts bade him go quite a lot more quickly than he normally would have done anything. He couldn’t stay at any one item for too long because when he did, he started counting them and how many different variations there were and then his eye would wander onto the next product and the next and he would count those too, and it was all very strange but for some reason he kept doing it unless he kept his eyes down and focused on what his shoes were doing. The tightness in his chest was back and refused to abate.

The checkout line was no better. He had to focus on the contents of the basket over his arm in order to keep his eyes off of the myriad small items packed onto either side of the aisle. When it came time to put all of it onto the belt he was _almost_ relieved.

“How many bags you want?” intoned the cashier.

“Five,” Edward said shortly. The cashier cast an eye over his groceries. 

“I could probably fit them into four – “

“No,” Edward snapped. “Good lord, why did you even _ask_ if you intended to _tell_ me how many bags I wanted?”

“Sorry.” The cashier shrugged and started scanning. “Just trying to do you a favour.”

“If I wanted a favour, I’d ask for one.”

The customer behind Edward sighed. He managed to resist the temptation to turn around and let them know whom, exactly, they were irritating. It wasn’t terribly difficult; the urge to count what was on the shelves was prevalent even though he could only see what was on them in his memory. He didn’t feel remotely at ease until he was standing on the sidewalk outside of the store with five plastic bags gripped in his hands. He looked behind him. Just the thought of having to go in there again was… unsettling.

This was all residual damage from having spent the last year and a half running himself into the ground. He would deal with it and that would be that.

He re-entered the apartment and put the bags onto the kitchen table. As he put together a serving of spaghetti and garlic toast, his thoughts turned to the car he definitely needed. To get one he needed to accumulate the money through day trading. He was good at it, but there was a fair bit of chance involved and so it was going to take him a few days. He put down the knife he’d been using and sighed through his nose, glaring at the tile backsplash behind the sink as though it could solve all of his problems. He _could_ have left _today_ , but _no_. No, Jonathan had decided to tell him there was something wrong with him and implied the OCD he did not have was out of control. As though Jonathan had the right to say any such things. Edward’s health _had_ taken a dip recently, but it was easily rectified. Jonathan had been wilfully destroying his for all the time Edward had known him. So really, any health advice _he_ had to offer was laughably hypocritical.

_Or he simply cares about your health more than he cares about his own._

Of course he did. If Edward were incapacitated, who would support him?

_“I would rather die along the way than live with you acting as though I am beholden to you for getting me there.”_

He was gripping the knife handle a little too hard, so he forced himself to release it entirely. No. Jonathan, while decrepit, was not a needy man. He would take Edward’s help if it were offered, but never once had he acted as though he felt entitled to it. He would survive or he wouldn’t, and that was fine with him.

Jonathan wasn’t important right now. Edward had told him they were through, after all. It had been a stupid thing to say and he doubted Jonathan would hold him to it, but he as a variable had been removed from the equation. He would eat, and then he would read some of the less important messages and then he would go to bed. This was all under control. Of course it was.

//

Oh, it felt good to lie in a real bed again. For the last few weeks he’d been bunking in Jonathan’s pickup truck, usually inside on the bench but having to settle for the bed while he’d been repairing said seat. He had no trouble sleeping in uncomfortable conditions, but this was definitely more along the lines of what he deserved. Not exactly _close,_ as it was only a queen. Improvements were improvements, however.

He could sleep as long as he wanted, too. No work to do, no one depending on him to be up at a particular time. Not that his children had ever really done that. They were good at occupying themselves.

He opened his eyes and looked in the direction of the balcony door. There _was_ the question of Ada. If Jonathan were no longer coming, it would be half the hassle to get across the border. He could go and get her. Bring her here and then –

He hadn’t told her what had happened to Alan. And he couldn’t now. So that was going to have to wait. When he was ready to leave, _then_ he’d go and get her. He’d be able to do it then. She was probably better off wherever she’d gone anyway.

Better off without her father.

He rolled onto his other side, bunching the sheet beneath his arm. He would fix it. He would fix everything. He was taking control and it was going to be fine.

He hadn’t expected it to be this quiet. Oh, there was the expected rush of cars going by far too fast and distant yelling from the floors above, but… there was something else. He frowned into the darkness, attempting to locate it. It was almost like the hum of electricity, but higher in pitch. Where could that possibly be coming from? The only thing he had running was the refrigerator, and that certainly wasn’t causing it. Neither would his computer, currently in sleep mode. He closed his eyes again and resolved to ignore it.

Hm. No. No, that wasn’t doing it. He threw aside the sheet and got up. He was going to have to find whatever it was and… unplug it, probably. He slid his glasses back on and looked around for some clue as to the direction of the noise. It didn’t seem to be coming from _anywhere_. But that was impossible. He was hearing it, therefore it existed. Somewhere.

A walkthrough of the apartment provided no insight. No matter what part of it he entered, the sound neither increased nor decreased in volume. He sat back down on the edge of the bed, bracing his chin in the palm of one hand. Well, that simply made no sense at all! A noise that came from _nowhere_? That pointed only to it being a hallucination, which was of course patently wrong. He was tired, but not enough so to begin hearing things that weren’t audible in reality. So what could possibly be a real and present noise that he was seemingly unable to locate? 

Wait.

There _was_ one thing it could be, but… where on earth would he have gotten it from? He hadn’t listened to music in a while, nor had he been to any particularly loud construction sites, nor had he fired any…

 _He_ hadn’t fired any guns recently. But the police officer who had killed his son had. 

He lay back down again and stared at the dark ceiling. For the first time in a _long_ time he felt… discouraged. As though there were simply no longer any point in trying. Not in any suicidal way, but in a… blank and empty way. As though he’d been abruptly, completely hollowed out by some unknown and unexplainable cosmic force.

Now that he knew it was there, it was indescribably annoying. Worse, there was absolutely _nothing_ he could do about having tinnitus. Oh, there was some sort of exercise where one tapped the back of their head and it went away for a while, but that wasn’t a _solution_. The _solution_ was to simply _live_ with it, as though that were any kind of answer at all. If he were not careful with his hearing from now on, the extreme outcome was that he end up nearly deaf with the only sound he would never stop hearing being an infernal, endless ringing noise that came from nowhere and meant nothing. 

This must have been how Jonathan had felt when he’d realised he would never really walk again. It was possible his knee could be _somewhat_ repaired though surgery, but it had been so long since the attack that it could not possibly be restored to its original condition. Not even any _ideal_ condition: once a knee was gone, it was gone. Just like this fragment of his hearing that had been lost to the ringing.

Just like Alan had been lost to the gunshots that had caused it.

He brought his hands up to rub at his face. He couldn’t think about that right now. It could wait. Right now he needed to get some sleep so he could go back to work.

The ringing seemed to have gotten louder. He knew it hadn’t, but it seemed to have. That was worse than if it really had. He sighed and brought his arms back down, joining his hands together just above his stomach. It was going to be an unexpectedly long night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally I was just going to give him tinnitus induced by being punched in the head so many times, but then I had that evil idea. I have tinnitus (caused by ear surgery when I was a kid; I don’t remember a time without it and for the longest time I thought the ringing was just what silence sounded like) but I didn’t give it to him as projection or for representation or because having tinnitus bothers me (it doesn’t, I’m long since acclimated to it); I just find that likely health problems get mostly ignored unless they're plot convenient and I wanted to throw another one into the ring. Tinnitus is incurable but not hard to manage (as long as you NEVER try to drown it out), though I’ve heard it’s a lot harder to ignore if you get it later in life than as a kid like I did.
> 
> I hate pineapples and I don’t think they belong anywhere.


	3. The Diagnosis

**The Diagnosis**

-

When he woke up it was nearly noon, and despite that he was very close to giving into the temptation of going back to sleep. He hadn’t been sleeping much for so long and it had been so hard to _get_ to sleep in the first place that really, he deserved it. But his thoughts were already passively lining up what he needed to get done, none of which would happen while he was asleep, so he reluctantly pushed the sheet off and sat up. That led to about three minutes of coughing, after which he just sort of stared at the floor for a minute wondering why he wanted a cigarette after all that. He’d work that out later. He needed to shower. Properly. The YMCA he’d been making use of before now only went so far. He looked over at the stationary bicycle standing away from the wall. He would get back to doing regular exercise as well, but not today. Tomorrow or the next. It wasn’t as important just yet.

His first two attempts to make the bed saw them not going quite right, but the third time turned out very nicely. He then went into the bathroom and removed his clothes to the laundry basket. As he turned towards the shower he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, and obviously he couldn’t see much but what he _thought_ he saw bade him return to the bedroom momentarily for his glasses, which he’d left on the bedside table. What he’d seen was there, only worse. 

He wasn’t unobservant. He knew he’d been steadily losing weight for years. In his twenties he’d been very on top of it – clean eating, exercise regimen, the whole nine yards – but then his priorities had changed. He’d meant to get back to it since…

Well, it didn’t matter what he’d _meant_ to do because he hadn’t _done_ it. He’d instead deteriorated. A lot. The man looking back at him right now didn’t at all match up to the image of himself he remembered. _This_ man looked… ill. Like Jonathan did. Almost. He wasn’t there yet but he was in danger of becoming so.

_“You’ve changed, Edward.”_

And everyone had noticed _except_ him.

No. He’d noticed. He’d just told himself it could wait. He’d told himself over and over and over again, and if he continued doing that now one day he would look up in the mirror and he would see the man Jonathan had become: skeletal, sick, unable to do any of the things he cared about because of how decrepit his neglected body had become. Jonathan had had tremors in his hands ever since his mid-thirties. He was long since past the point of being able to do the fine motor tasks that Edward had spent so many of his own years doing. That Edward _enjoyed_ doing. The tightness in his chest had returned, but this time he knew what it was about. All of… _this_ had to end now. Literally now. He was dangerously close to the point of it being irreversible. 

_It’s fine_ , he told himself, putting his glasses back on the countertop and resuming what he’d been doing. _I’m going to take care of it._

It took him several more minutes to convince his thoughts of that, which meant he kept getting distracted, which meant showering took a very long time since he had to do things a certain way and being preoccupied meant doing them wrong by mistake. He finally wrangled them into proper order and returned them to his more immediate task: the day trading. It was so boring he actually considered getting a chair for his desk, but having a chair would inherently make it even _more_ boring. Nothing exciting ever happened while one was sitting down. 

Once he had shaved and his shower was finally finished, he dried himself off and walked into the bedroom in search of some clothes. He wasn’t going anywhere but he did have work to do, so he settled for a dress shirt and pants. That was a good sign, come to think of it. Nobody could be in the proper mindset to get work done in their pyjamas and he hadn’t even been _tempted_ to put those back on.

While he waited for the water in the kettle to boil, he went onto the balcony and took out his cigarette case. The fifth one he put into his mouth, and the fourth he broke into three and dropped into the ashtray. Then he walked up to the railing and lit the one he’d taken out. It was as dark and dreary as it had been yesterday. 

_“Until you are ready to do something about your disorder, I don’t think you should be going anywhere.”_

“I don’t have it,” Edward muttered to the accursed memory.

_“It’s time to face it, Edward.”_

“There’s nothing to face,” he said again, but Jonathan was not there and so it was really rather pointless. Also, he was wrong. As though someone could have a disorder severely enough to need to face it without there being any proof of them having it. Really.

 _“It’s_ this _which troubles me.”_

He glanced down at his hands. His fingers were not quite visible past the second knuckle thanks to the typing gloves and he could admit that what he could see didn’t look great. But that was because Jonathan’s truck had been so damned filthy. Edward had barely been able to _look_ at it without needing to wash his hands. 

_“The only thing you can control in there is how many times you wash your hands, but you’re not in control of that, either, are you?”_

“Of course I am,” he said even though Sabrina could not hear him either, throwing the filter into the street. “I’m in control of everything. You know that.”

His phone vibrated in his pocket so he pulled it out to look at it. Thirty-four unread messages since last night.

_I’m tired of being in control of everything._

That one was actually true. He was tired of being at everyone’s beck and call at all hours of the day. He wanted to… he frowned. What _did_ parents usually do with their children? He had no idea. Ada liked colouring. All right, he wanted to go find Ada and colour with her. That would be nice. 

That’s for you! _she declared, and he picked up the paper she had thrust in his lap bemusedly. It had a pair of green circles on it with the remainder of their shape outlined in pink and blue. In between these two facsimiles she had drawn him, but… she had drawn him smiling. Did she truly think he was that happy?_

So you admit it. You aren’t happy. You aren’t happy at all. Then what’s the point, Eddie? What’s the damn point?

He closed his eyes for a moment. 

The day trading. He went back inside and got out a mug and a tea bag, sitting down at the kitchen table with them and the kettle. He would look at the immediate messages while he was drinking it and then he would get started. That was the plan, anyway. For some reason he couldn’t stop thinking about Jonathan’s conviction that Edward had OCD. Why did he believe such a ridiculous thing? Jonathan was not _stupid_. Jonathan had also never lied to him and it didn’t make sense that this would be the one he would start out with. It was so easily disproven. Their degree of closeness had waxed and waned many times over the years, considering their positions in life, but Jonathan was so observant that it was just plain _bizarre_ he would evaluate Edward in such a way when it was definitely not true. Was Edward doing something that might, possibly, be _mistaken_ for OCD? Or had it merely been so long since Jonathan had been in school that he had gotten the diagnostic criteria confused with Internet memes about needing pencils straightened by length and colour?

Jonathan didn’t use the Internet. Edward was positive he didn’t have an inkling of what a meme was. Even if he’d seen one, he wouldn’t understand it. That man barely understood how to turn a computer off. 

Edward, still seated at the kitchen table, looked up at the currently dark monitors on his desk. All right. It was time to put this to rest. He would humour Jonathan and find some checklist or other that no doubt diagnosed _everyone_ with OCD, and then he would print it off and show it to Jonathan so that he would know he was wrong. That problem now pending resolution, he was able to focus on his messages again. Half of them were about the vigilante. Edward tapped his index finger against the mug three times. Some of his informants had quit over this new and unassessed threat, but many of the ones who remained seemed to be climbing over themselves to give Edward information about him. Good. Competition was ideal in attaining optimal results.

Drink finished, he put the cup upside down in the sink and walked over to the desk. Two tasks lay before him now: proving that he did not have OCD and patiently acquiring enough money he did not have to think about how much he had.

He typed ‘OCD’ into the search bar disinterestedly, and the first result was of course Wikipedia, which he could write off immediately. Oh yes, it had sources and was edited by everyone from anime-obsessed twelve-year-olds to professionals at the height of their craft, but he didn’t think Jonathan would accept that as proof. The second result was for the Mayo Clinic. He had to admit that _was_ a reputable institution, so he clicked on it and moved it off his primary screen. He could do that later. Jonathan could be proven wrong any time, but Edward needed a car ideally within the next few days. He would soon have to buy a case of water and he was absolutely not carrying that back from the store.

He left the webpage open on the top left monitor for the next several hours without looking at it. Well, he attempted not to. It seemed to be mocking him up there with knowledge that was definitely not true but that he had no _proof_ of being so, given that he hadn’t read it yet. It made focusing on his required day trading much more difficult than it needed to be. It was all going very nicely, of course, and he was a good ways from the twenty-five grand he had started with, but care was still essential at this stage. It could all go very wrong very fast.

So he should probably read the webpage before he did something _really_ reckless, like click the wrong button as he’d almost just done while attempting to look at the top left screen with one eye and pay attention to what he was doing with the other. True, it would only have been one link over the other and nothing catastrophic would have occurred, but mistakes were unacceptable.

He sighed and looked up at it. It wasn’t going to say anything anyway. He didn’t have that. Besides. Everyone and their grandma was being labelled with it these days. All you had to do was have an overly organised bathroom cabinet, as though knowing where all of your toiletries and how many of them you had was worth of being pathologized. He knew, obviously. One of everything, other than the five razor blades which included the one that was on the razor. There was nothing wrong with knowing that. Anybody who didn’t was probably a moron. No, definitely a moron. The kind of person that drove Walmart to have razors on the way to the checkout. That was where they kept all of the things that stupid people bought.

He brought the window down to the monitor he was currently looking at, one corner of his mouth pulling downwards in derision. Why was every website _blue_ these days? Were people really so stupid that a website being blue kept them browsing it longer? 

_Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) features a pattern of unwanted thoughts and fears (obsessions) that lead you to do repetitive behaviors (compulsions). These obsessions and compulsions interfere with daily activities and cause significant distress._

Ha! Wrong already. His daily activities went exactly as intended. It was true that he didn’t really have an explanation for what had happened at the grocery store, but it would come to him.

_OCD often centers around certain themes — for example, an excessive fear of getting contaminated by germs. To ease your contamination fears, you may compulsively wash your hands until they're sore and chapped._

Wrong again. If he were afraid of contaminants, he wouldn’t be spending so much time around the filthiest man in Gotham. Speaking of time, this was a waste. He had more important things to do.

_You may or may not realize that your obsessions and compulsions are excessive or unreasonable, but they take up a great deal of time and interfere with your daily routine and social, school or work functioning._

He shook his head. That was how _all_ the psychiatrists at Arkham operated. Insisting their patients had something that the patient was just too addled by their condition to understand. Insulting, really. Who _wouldn’t_ notice that their time was being taken up by

Making the bed that morning had taken fifteen minutes. It should have taken five. It used to take five.

He shook his head. A coincidence. It didn’t mean anything. His mind was making connections that weren’t there. It did that sometimes. There was a lot going on up there. He did an excellent job of keeping things in order, but things were bound to collide now and again.

_Obsessions often have themes to them, such as:_

_Doubting and having difficulty tolerating uncertainty_

_Needing things orderly and symmetrical_

Why were all of these things listed as though they were _negative_? Wanting your things to be –

Well, no. It said _needing_ , which held a completely different meaning. But he merely had them that way because he _wanted_ them like that. And he wasn’t going to make a mess just to prove this website wrong. Besides. If more people paid as much attention as he did, perhaps this city wouldn’t be such a festering cesspool. Perhaps. Probably not. Definitely not.

_As with obsessions, compulsions typically have themes, such as:_

_Counting_

_Orderliness_

There it was again. Orderliness being categorised as a bad thing. Honestly. If other people wanted to be complete slobs, that had no bearing on –

Counting? Well, yes, he did that, but it was… it was nothing. He just… liked to know how much there was of something at any given time. It was often useful information.

_The cause of obsessive-compulsive disorder isn't fully understood._

Convenient, as was most of what this page said about standards the average person really should be striving towards.

_Factors that may increase the risk of developing or triggering obsessive-compulsive disorder include:_

_Stressful life events. If you've experienced traumatic or stressful events, your risk may increase. This reaction may, for some reason, trigger the intrusive thoughts, rituals and emotional distress characteristic of OCD._

Well, that covered just about everything, didn’t it? He supposed the therapist he was doubtless supposed to see over this would posit it had started when his mother had left, or the first time his father had hit him, but the joke was on them because it was neither.

… neither because _nothing_ had started.

_Problems resulting from obsessive-compulsive disorder may include, among others:_

_Excessive time spent engaging in ritualistic behaviors_

_Health issues, such as contact dermatitis from frequent hand-washing_

_Difficulty attending work, school or social activities_

His schoolwork would have been _fine_ if they hadn’t had so many silly _rules_ about it. If he solved it, what did it matter _how_? It wasn’t as though he were writing random answers that magically turned out to be right every single time.

The next page was denoted ‘diagnosis and treatment’, and he clicked on it even though this was information he definitely did not need. It said much what he expected – some psychiatrist would run some tests and come up with a diagnosis for a conveniently difficult-to-diagnose disorder – and then prescribe therapy and pills. Even in the extremely unlikely circumstance the end result of such action was that he did have it – which he didn’t – he couldn’t go into _therapy._ He was an escaped convict! Going to a doctor would mean going to _jail_. To do anything about it, he would have to go straight to medication, which was arguably just as bad. None of that mattered. He didn’t have anything. He was fine.

He was standing in the grocery store and not being able to count everything was bothering him. No. _Bothering_ was much too small a word. He had _literally_ been _paralysed_ by the knowledge.

That didn’t mean –

But knowing how many of each type of apple or salad mix or protein drink the store had wasn’t important information. It was completely useless. He could not think of a circumstance where he _would_ need to know that, unless he were the manager of said store and he was tasked with counting inventory. In that case, knowing would be incredibly convenient. He tapped his third finger on the left-click button five times.

He looked down at his hand, then back up again.

This discrepancy was probably meaningless. But it _was_ a discrepancy. So he had to be sure.

He clicked on the first result that came up for the search terms ‘counting OCD’, and for a moment nothing existed except for an electric dread and the paragraph in front of him:

_People with counting compulsions may count because they feel that certain numbers have a special significance, and therefore specific actions must be performed a certain number of times. For example many people with OCD feel that the number four is especially significant, and will therefore do things in sets of fours. For example if they smoke one cigarette, they may feel a sense of incompleteness unless they smoke three more. So they will count the number of cigarettes to be sure they have met the numerical goal._

They _did_ have a special significance. Some of them were wrong and some of them were right. That was just… how it was. 

_People with counting compulsions may also count without thinking about a specific number. They might count their steps when walking, count tiles on the ceiling, or count cars driving past._

He’d had to count his steps to get through the grocery store.

_People with counting obsessions do not always have a reason for counting. With numbers, the OCD does not always activate because it is worried about a certain outcome. Often taking 4 steps within say one block on the sidewalk, or looking away from a clock at a certain number may just feel right, rather than be driven by fear._

“Because it is!” he shouted, gripping the mouse unintentionally hard. “It _is_ right and it’s _always been_ right and _you_ don’t get to tell me it _isn’t_!”

_It isn’t right, Eddie._

He crouched down in front of the desk, gripping the edge with both hands and pressing his forehead into it. It _was_ right. Primes were good and evens were bad and odds were neutral. That was it. And there was nothing wrong with that.

_There is, though. There is something wrong._

“There isn’t.”

_Jonathan told you there was._

“Jonathan’s a –“ But no. None of the usual words applied to him. He was not a liar, nor an idiot, nor was he a bad doctor. As far as diagnoses went, anyway. “He’s wrong.”

_Then explain the numbers._

He couldn’t explain them. They were inherent.

_They’re not inherent. They started._

He remembered that.

He stood up and turned around. He’d been at this too long. Things were starting to make sense when they had no grounds in reality. Besides. Not everything he had here was beholden to a number. And he could prove it! In the top left desk drawer there would be a manifest of all the things he had requested to be here, which was something the Broker always complained about for some reason. He’d mentioned Edward making him jump through hoops, but Edward was paying him and paying him very well so he had better be doing exactly what was asked of him. He removed the paper from the expected drawer and looked it over.

Well, it had to be wrong. Everything on this list was clearly in multiples of three or five, if it were in multiple at all. He glanced up at the kitchen table, which had… three chairs. His breathing was heavy all of a sudden.

Three chairs _was_ … unusual. It was right, but also… strange, when he thought about it. That, however, had nothing on the next item his eyes paused upon:

_Three forks each with five tines._

That was… specific. And he had written this list himself, so he must have…

He put the paper onto the desk without looking at it further and walked over into the kitchen, yanking open the cutlery drawer. Among the usual things one might expect, it contained three spoons, three butter knives, and three forks each with five tines.

Standing suddenly seemed impossible, so he sat down on the floor, back against the cabinet under the sink, and stared at the table in front of him. It had three legs.

“It’s a coincidence,” he murmured to himself, though not even he could believe that anymore. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

He was fourteen and lying on the ground outside the school. He didn’t want to get up because then he would have to go home, and his father would see he’d been beaten up again. His father didn’t care that it was because of his accent, but he _did_ care that Edward was not fighting back. He would care the whole time he had Edward on the floor in front of him, and when he was tired he would say, “ _Tu n'arriveras jamais à rien,_ _Édouard_ ,” and walk away. And because he was not really looking forward to going home and being hit and being told for the umpteenth time he would never amount to anything, he was going to stay here and count all the blades of grass he could see because that was… nice. It didn’t take away the pain in his ribs or the scrapes on his arms but it did make them matter a little less.

And then later at home he’d counted the slats of wood on the floor, and the stairs, and the chair legs he could see for a long while after his father had disappeared behind his slammed bedroom door to do whatever it was he did afterward. And it had been just as nice. It had been nice that day, and the next, and every day thereafter. Including today, yesterday, and the day before, and every single day Jonathan had spent watching Edward fix his truck.

_“You’ve been at that one nut for a while now.”_

_“I like doing things right. Does that offend you?”_

_“Right is relative.”_

Edward’s right and everyone else’s right were two totally different, irreconcilable things. And he had tried to explain it away. _Wanted_ to explain it away, even now. It would be so much easier than trying to figure out what he was supposed to do with this knowledge.

He sat there on the floor, arms leaning loosely over his bent knees. He was at a total loss as to what to do. There were three solutions: therapy, medication, or living as he had been. The first one was out. There was no such thing as an underground psychologist, and even if there had been Edward had been with Jonathan long enough to know that would be an incredibly stupid thing to try. Living as he had been was also out, because now that he knew about it it really _was_ going to become disruptive and interfere with everything he did. He and it could co-exist so long as he didn’t have to think about it and what it meant, but now that he _did_ that would be impossible. No, now every single time he engaged in one of the compulsions he was going to be reminded that his mind, his incomparable, unmatched mind, was broken. It always had been and it always would be. 

And somehow he was supposed to live with that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note
> 
> His third finger was on the left-click because he’s left-handed. Just clarifying that was intentional.
> 
> The text about OCD is verbatim from the Mayo Clinic and the New England OCD Institute websites.


	4. Part Four.  The Sertraline

**Part Four. The Sertraline**

-

Why do you do that?

_“Not now. Let’s go.”_

Alan could have helped him with this. Alan would have _wanted_ to help him with this.

 _“Are you trying to_ fix _me now? Is that it?”_

No, Dad. I don’t think being a good person would fix you.

He’d been right. He’d been right without even knowing what he was talking about. 

He leaned his head back against the cupboard and stared dully at the three damned table legs in front of him. He had ignored it for so long. No, _pretended it away_ for so long. Knowing about it didn’t help at all. It didn’t change anything. And it shouldn’t have. This kind of problem did not just vanish; he needed to solve it. But he couldn’t solve it. It was insoluble. It was deep inside of his brain somewhere in a place no one could locate and he was stuck with it. He’d been stuck with it from the day he’d remained on the ground after school and started counting the blades of grass.

He had so much to do but he couldn’t move. And that in itself was stupid. It wasn’t as though he were freezing time by doing so. The OCD would still be there whether he stayed here forever or whether he got up and booked a flight to Canada immediately. But what was he _supposed_ to do? Was there something one was _supposed_ to do once they’d discovered how much of their life had been diverted into a black hole by way of superstition and compulsion?

Well… he hadn’t eaten yet. He could do that. It wouldn’t solve anything, but it was _something_.

So he got up and started making himself scrambled eggs and toast. It was… an ordeal. He couldn’t tell if knowing about the counting was making it worse or if it had always been this bad and he simply hadn’t realised it. By the time he was sitting at the table with it he was already ready for the day to be over. He picked up his fork and stared at the five tines for a long moment. Then he put his other elbow on the table and leaned his forehead against his hand.

_I really am pathetic._

Eventually he threw the fork into the sink and ate with a spoon instead. It was a clumsy solution, but it would do for now. Until he made spaghetti again, that was. Afterward he went outside and smoked the last three cigarettes. It was a stupid thing to do but he _had_ to get back to work and it was the fastest way to clear out his thoughts. While he was there it snowed for about two minutes and then stopped. Sixteen people walked by but none of them looked at him. They had all been in the presence of the Riddler for thirty seconds each but they would never know about it.

That thought helped.

He went back inside and returned to his computer. The webpage was still up there. Mocking him.

_It’s not mocking you. It’s a webpage._

It was making him _feel_ mocked.

_If you have OCD, you may be ashamed and embarrassed about the condition, but treatment can be effective._

Treatment. Can be. That meant they threw solutions at the wall in the hopes one would work. That meant being shuffled between doctors, being given different combinations of pills, and maybe even having parts of his brain stimulated electrically. That was what the other page had said. He was someone’s lifelong experiment now. 

No. No, he could handle this. He would think of something. He could not get a doctor. That was out. Maybe once he had crossed the border, but not now. So that left medication. He _could_ get that. And it would help. Possibly. That was his next step.

He went back to the Mayo Clinic page and looked at their list, which gave him five possible antidepressants. He stared at them for several minutes, his mind passively attempting to find some way out of this that didn’t involve reliance on anything but himself. But while it was doing that it also flicked back through all the incidents where this problem truly _had_ gotten in his way – including the time he had had to ask Ada to bring him a marker so that he would not abrade all of the skin off of his own two hands – and he concluded there _was_ no way out. This was his life now. He had a disorder. His _thinking_ was disordered.

He took off his glasses and bent over his desk so that his elbows were on top of it, eyes contained in his hands. _Calisse._ He didn’t need this right now. He _needed_ enough money to go to Canada and do absolutely _nothing_ for a very long time. Now he couldn’t do that. Now he had to deal with _this_ first.

_Until you are ready to do something about your disorder, I don’t think you should be going anywhere._

“I am!” he snapped, gesturing at the screen in front of him. “Not that _you’re_ one to talk. When was the last time _you_ went to a doctor? On purpose, I mean. Don’t answer, I already know. Never. It was never.”

What was he supposed to do in the meantime? If he had to wait until the disorder had been… handled, he was stuck here for at _least_ two more weeks. He’d be stable financially after the end of one. Then what?

_“I can only do so much at once. And Canada is not a place where I’m magically going to change just because it isn’t here. I’m going to be the same person, only in a different place.”_

You can start over. No one ever has to know what kind of person you were here. You can go there and be someone new. You can be whoever you want. This doesn’t have to mean anything to you anymore.

He didn’t know if that were possible.

Leaving and being someone new meant giving it all up. His information network, his influence, his reputation. All of it. Edward Nygma – the Riddler – would have to be returned to the nonexistence from whence he had come.

_I don’t want to do that._

There’s something really wrong with you and I don’t know what it is, and you don’t… seem interested in finding out or fixing it. And all this time you were promising you’d move on and stop doing this, you didn’t… you didn’t even mean it.

“I did mean it,” he said quietly.

_If you’d meant it, you would be there right now. You would have a place to go and some sort of legitimate career underway and he would still be alive. But you aren’t because you didn’t._

Alan’s life needed to mean something. If it didn’t it was only a testament to the depth of Edward’s failure. He had made his son a promise he had had no intention of keeping until it was too late.

It was too late for Alan. Not for Ada. Not for himself.

He had two weeks to figure out how to prove to himself he could cross the border without bringing the Riddler with him. To do that, he needed to accomplish something… good. Ish. Something morally upstanding that he would never so much as _think_ about under normal circumstances. A puzzle only he could solve, but without harming anyone or breaking any… breaking _too_ many laws. And there needed to be a real, concrete consequence if he failed on either of those fronts.

His eye trailed over to the monitor displaying one of his email accounts. He was still sorting through which were important and which were irrelevant. There was a _lot_ of duplicate information about the vigilante being sent, which made sense considering most people did not live to tell the –

Oh. Oh, that was it, wasn’t it. He had to catch the vigilante.

Yes! He would normally _never_ make the effort to remove one of Gotham’s seemingly infinite criminal hoodlums from the street. Especially not one who couldn’t come up with his own gimmick. Catching him would definitely be ‘good’: beneficial for everyone else, a complete waste of time for himself. And he would do it under his old name, the _real_ one. The one he’d been saving all this time for when he was done.

I’m asking you to accept something important to me. And that’s getting you out of here.

“I’m going,” he said. “I promised you and I will. But you need to understand. I have to know if I can do it without _bringing_ any of…”

Any of the man Alan had known. The man he should not have known because Edward should have been better.

I think there’s still some part of you that wants to be better, but you don’t know where it is or how to find it.

Now was the time to figure that out. But first things first. Transportation and medication. He needed both and he needed them now.

//

When he returned to the apartment after doing both of those things, his dearest wish was to take a nap. After the requisite handwashing he went into the bedroom, stripped to his underclothes, and laid down to do just that. Unfortunately, he still had tinnitus. That made him think, which made him think about how he had had to fill out the forms for his new vehicle with _real_ information instead of an alias and a fake address, and how he had taken said vehicle to the location of the most discreet drug dealer he knew of and had proceeded to… leave. 

The truth of it was, Edward had never been to one in person. Jonathan usually took care of that. He needed much higher quantities of that kind of thing anyway, so it made much more sense for Jonathan to simply add on what Edward wanted and send it to him once his shipment had been delivered. He didn’t partake very often – once a substance had disorganised his mind, it took a while for him to pull it back together – but one single person knowing about one single occasion was too much. This time, however, he was going to have to do it himself. Jonathan was not here to do it for him.

 _I don’t need it. I can get along without it. I have all this time. Really, it’s been more of a_ help _than a hindrance._

 _“Do you know what the most frustrating thing about my short-lived stint as a therapist was? The expectation that, by seeing me once a week, it would somehow magically_ fix _all of those problems. No work, no effort.”_

Of _course_ Jonathan had been making a point with that.

 _He_ was _looking at you pointedly._

“Why should I take his advice?” he asked of the stucco ceiling. “This _is_ the man who insisted _I_ fix his knee even though I’m not a surgeon, and look at him now! He’s half crippled!”

 _That was_ him _not listening to_ your _advice. A completely different situation and you know it._

“I don’t see why I should heed his if he doesn’t heed mine.”

_That depends. Do you plan on never entering a grocery store again?_

He folded his arms. “Maybe it was a fluke.”

_Really? Why don’t you pay it a visit, then?_

He wasn’t going to do that, but he _was_ going to get a box of cigarettes. Sleep obviously was not going to come so he might as well get up.

The first thing he noticed when he got to the nearest corner store was that there was not as much to count as there had been at the grocery store. He felt… _relieved_ to know he _could_ count it all. In fact, he was so busy doing that the cashier had to get his attention.

“You decided what you want or what?” he said.

“Yes,” said Edward, annoyed he’d been interrupted… until he realised what he’d been interrupted _from_. “Export A Greens, please.”

As usual, when he got back with them he opened the pack, took out two and broke them one at a time into three, and put the remainder into his cigarette case. Then he withdrew one and went outside with it. He took out his lighter only to realise that if he lit it, this would be the fourth one that day. He couldn’t stop at four but five would be too many. In fact, three was already too many. This brand was incredibly strong and he usually had three for an entire day. His chest hurt just _thinking_ about going up to five.

But it helped. 

_You’d rather self-medicate with this than go and get some_ actual _medication? If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were an idiot._

“It’s different.”

_Alan didn’t like it._

He leaned against the railing of the patio, closing his eyes. “I know.”

_So the problem is?_

“He’s not here. So there isn’t much of a point, is there.”

_There’s only so much of you I can fix, Dad._

“I didn’t ask you to do that.”

 _He should never have felt the need to. What kind of father shows his son that he_ needs _to be fixed?_

“Fine.” He tossed the cigarette into the road for some lucky vagrant to stumble upon. “Just… I don’t want to think about that anymore.”

 _Now you need to finally_ start _thinking about it._

His hand was clenched around the railing. “I don’t like how it makes me feel.”

_You should have thought of that before you got your son killed._

//

He had been parked in the lot across from his destination for about twenty minutes. The dealer ran a hot dog cart just outside of downtown and seemed to have only sold hot dogs since he’d arrived. Unless he was simply too far away to see what was wrapped inside of those buns. Or inside of the hot dogs. Or on top of them. It _was_ feasible that someone could ask for mushrooms on their hot dog, and among the conventional kind there would be –

He sat up straight. It looked like she was closing up shop. He couldn’t keep waiting. He had to do this now. He pushed open the door and crossed the space between them. As soon as he was close she said, “I’m out.”

“You think _I_ want a _hot dog_?” Edward said, insulted. “Good lord, woman, do you have _eyes_?”

She glanced up and down at him. “Don’t ring a bell.”

He almost explained it to her before remembering he didn’t actually _want_ her to know who she was. “I need this,” he said, removing a folded slip of paper from his pocket and handing it to her. She opened it slowly.

“They just hire you as a narc?” she asked. “First of all, this is a hot dog cart. I got hot dogs. That’s it. Second, do you even know what this is or did you just Google ‘drugs’ and this was the first result?”

“I’m not a – “ He heaved a sigh in frustration and snatched the paper back. “If you don’t have it, fine. Merely _mentioning_ it would have been answer enough.”

“If you don’t got a reference, I don’t got answers.”

A reference? What, so she knew he was a legitimate buyer? Why was she being so difficult? It wasn’t as though she were selling mortgages or private jets. “Jonathan Crane,” he said. “How’s _that_ for a reference.”

She dropped the bottle of ketchup she was holding. “Crane?” she said, her tone much more to his liking. “You know Crane?”

“I do. Quite personally, in fact.”

She slowly put the bottle back on the cart. “I… don’t deal with Crane anymore.”

“How in the world do you think I’m going to terrorise Gotham with 750 milligrams of sertraline?” Edward said, exasperated. “You could force a man to swallow the entire bottle and it wouldn’t even kill him. Or do you think Scarecrow suddenly, for some reason, is using _anti-anxiety_ medication to make fear toxin with? Do you have it or not?”

“Gimme an address,” she said. “You’ll have it in the morning.”

He wrote it down on the other side of the paper with a greasy pen she produced from one of her pockets, and as he was doing it he thought about how many people he’d given his address to today. Two. Far too many. He might as well put himself in the phone book if he were going to be _this_ free with his location. 

“Is he dead?” she asked when he was about three metres away, and he stopped and turned around.

“What?”

“He got disappeared from the GCPD,” she said. “Some people think the vigilante got him. Stole him away before he could weasel his way out again.”

Edward focused very hard on not remembering that night.

“I hope he did,” she went on. “I hope he tortured that bastard to death.”

Edward decided it was best not to tell her that Scarecrow was not only not dead, but would periodically be enjoying a nice, quiet retirement. “You won’t see him again regardless,” was what he did say.

“I’d feel better knowing where he was so I could stick a knife in him.”

//

Sleep came easier that night, but lighter. He dreamt of all the times he’d kept Jonathan alive, but not sequentially. They were all of them mixed together, as though they had all happened at the same time. He was wet and shivering and naked on a bed in the Asylum with a black eye and a shattered knee and in the thrall of fear toxin. Only Edward could save him. Only Edward wanted to. He started walking across the room to do it but it seemed to have grown impossibly wide. The room was a bare four metres across but every step he took made no progress. He knew how many it took to cross it and he had passed that number several times over. He looked up from his feet, confused, and that was when Jonathan’s face turned from the wall to look at him. Only it wasn’t Jonathan’s face. It was Alan’s.

_You should have let him die, Dad._

The sweat on his body was already cold. He stared at the ceiling and counted his own shuddering breaths until his throat did not feel so tight. “He never would have said that,” he whispered to the dark. “He _chose_ to help me.”

Everything I am I learned from you.

Maybe Alan was right.

It’s okay, Dad. You’re going to be okay.

He _needed_ Alan to be right.

He rolled onto his side and pushed the sheet down to his waist. In the morning he would be given the sertraline and that was where he would start. 

Being a bad person seems to mean you can do whatever you want, but if you aren’t happy doing that why don’t you try something different?

“I’m going to,” he said. 

I think it would make you happier.

“It might.” It certainly couldn’t make things any _worse_.

He needed… something to work towards. His entire life had been focused on beating Batman and recovering from Batman and outsmarting Batman. But Batman was dead and Edward needed to start his life over. Do something different, because all the things he’d been doing weren’t working.

_Tu n’arriveras jamais à rien,_ _É_ _douard._

If Alan were wrong, then his father was right. And he couldn’t stand for that.

He would figure it out. He would figure it _all_ out. That was the sort of thing he did. But that was a later step on a trail that consisted of many, and right now he had more immediate things to focus on. 

//

He’d woken up at nine and, as he’d told himself he would the day before, had gotten on the stationary bike. He’d been okay for about ten minutes, and then his chest had started to ache and he had been unable to stop coughing. He’d sat there for a little while just staring in the direction of the bathroom, attempting to fathom how he had gotten this low. He _remembered_ it. It all seemed so clear and obvious now. But no matter what point in his life he examined, his reasoning at the time had always been the same:

_I’ll fix that when it’s over._

You’re not really planning on going, are you. You think you are. But you’re not. When this is done you’re just going to start all over again. Like you always do.

He wasn’t sure he’d ever gotten Alan to understand what a passion was. What it _really_ was. How it got into you and took you over and made every breath you took a contribution towards it. 

_What’s the difference between a passion and an obsession, Eddie?_

It was a good question. He wasn’t sure he had an answer. After he’d gotten off the bike and come outside in the hopes the air outside would help him breathe a little easier, he’d spent some minutes contemplating it. The largest distinction he could think of was that the word passion was applied when the outcome was good, but obsession was used when the endeavour failed. It was like that indie video game where one of the developers had had to mortgage their house in order to fund their passion. It was a move of total insanity. In ninety-nine percent of circumstances, anyone who did that would have lost everything to their obsession with trying to give the world something it had already proven it didn’t want. But that one percent… everyone always believed they were going to be in that one percent. Men like Edward were inherently destined to it, which left all the little people climbing over each other for that sliver of a chance that they could be anything _near_ what he was.

 _But you_ didn’t _succeed. That means your passion was actually an obsession, and you_ aren’t _in that one percent._

“He cheated,” Edward said. “If Selina had not interfered, I would have killed him.”

 _You’re damned lucky she interfered. The whole point was to prove that might did not make right, but even_ you _ended up turning to violence! You would have proven_ him _right, not you!_

“It’s no fault of mine that’s the only thing he understands.”

 _Which means only that_ you _didn’t_ get _him to understand._

“I _tried_ to make him use his brain,” Edward snapped, throwing up his arms in exasperation. “But I suppose a gorilla is always going to be a gorilla.”

_And what does that mean for you?_

He stared down at the box that had been left for him on the frost-covered patio table. He snatched it up and turned towards the patio door. “I’m going to take it.”

He sat down at the kitchen table and slit the box open with the scissors sitting in the holder on the counter next to the stove. They were in an unlabelled pill bottle. He unscrewed the lid and took one out and put it on the table in front of him, after which he closed the container again. He stared at it.

It was definitely the right one. A little green pill with the dosage – twenty-five milligrams – on one side and a code on the other. She hadn’t tried to pass something else off as what he’d asked for. 

He wasn’t going to take it.

He didn’t need it. Of course he didn’t need it. He was forty-six years old and he’d just now even _noticed_ he had OCD, so obviously he could get along on his own. 

_Don’t be stupid. You knew it was a problem the day you put those gloves on._

He was at the casino in Niagara Falls and the other players kept looking at his hands with some combination of confusion and disgust. He was not at all interested in explaining to them what filthy cesspools casinos were – even brand-new ones – nor was he interested in explaining that there was, in fact, a _correct_ way to wash ones’ hands and _their_ inability to care about that had nothing to do with him. The real problem was that the people he went up to the hotel with at night were starting to ask about it. Were starting to recommend him treatments for all sort of skin disorders. He’d been watching an old movie on television when he realised what the solution was: gloves. It was a severalfold solution. He would not have to touch so many things, people would not be able to look at them, and all he would have to do to explain it was to smile and say he was old-fashioned. 

And it had worked.

_But it was still a problem, Eddie._

Yes, yes it was. He wasn’t wearing the gloves now, so he could see how badly irritated they were and the particular places where excessive and frequent friction had permanently changed his skin. Moisturiser probably would have helped, but he’d never been able to stand having it on. He’d had gloves for that occasionally, but ordering things like that from the Tailor too often was too prone to start rumours he did not want to have to answer to.

_That pill on the table will probably help with that._

Probably. Now _there_ was an incentive. If there was one thing he loved, it was uncertainties.

_It would be nice not to have to wear them anymore._

He had to agree with that.

He still couldn’t bring himself to pick it up. He didn’t want to take it. Did he need to take it? There would be things it might make easier, but… was it _worth_ it? Was _ease_ worth handing over his brain chemistry to this little pill that science could not even fully explain the effects and workings of?

He got up and left for the shower. While he was there he thought about the order and the way he had to do it in and wondered if that would change too. If he decided to take it. Washing a certain way _was_ time-consuming. So was making the bed. So was putting his clothes on. So was shaving, and combing his hair, and towelling himself off. And all of that… that was only the _beginning_ of his day. 

_… I really do lose a lot of time to rituals._

It was an hour and a half later before he finally sat down again and looked at the pill. It sat there, and he looked at it, and it continued sitting there.

He didn’t want to take it. He didn’t need to. He was losing time but not that much. If he worked at it, he could probably pare down how much time he spent on his own. He could do that. Of course he could.

He put the pill back into the bottle and moved it over to his desk and made himself breakfast. Afterward it was there in the corner of his eye while he drank his tea and checked his emails. He didn’t need it. He didn’t need it.

_If you aren’t going to take it, then what are you going to do about the OCD?_

“Nothing. It’s not bothering me. Really, it’s an asset.”

_Would you like to revisit your silverware drawer?_

Or his dresser drawer, for that matter. 

He sat himself on the desk on the right side and picked up the bottle again, twisting it open. He tipped one of the pills into his palm and stared at it. It looked exactly the same as it had when he’d done this in the kitchen.

Did he _really_ have to take it?

_Remind yourself of the facts, Eddie._

“Which are?”

 _If you do not deal with this, you can never again go_ anywhere _that contains more than you have the ability to count._

That was… sobering.

 _And even if you_ do _have the ability, it will take up a significant portion of your attention. You’re right. It’s an asset_ now. _Will it be at a hardware store? A movie theatre? A museum?_

“No,” he admitted. 

_Ask yourself something._

“What.”

_What benefits you more: arranging your life around your OCD, or taking this pill?_

“The latter.”

_Why, then, are you making this so difficult?_

“Because I don’t _want_ to take it.”

_What are you going to do instead, then?_

There _wasn’t_ anything else. This was all he _could_ do. 

So he did it. Quickly, before he had a chance to talk himself out of it again. While he had a single moment of absent thought, he put it in his mouth and scrunched up his face and swallowed it.

In all the years he’d lived and all the hundreds of thousands of things he had done across them, he had rarely felt such a heavy sense of utter _failure_ as he did just then. He should have been able to handle it on his own, but he couldn’t. The OCD had beaten him. It had forced him to rely on something other than his own brain because his own brain was the very thing it was trying to destroy. It seemed as though he could feel it sitting inside of his stomach, poised to break down and release chemicals into his body that he did not want and did not want to need and should have been able to live without. 

_I’m going to have to do this every day for the rest of my life._

Without thinking he whipped the bottle across the room where it collided with the opposite wall in the kitchen, leaving a mark on the paint before bouncing off and rattling across the floor. He was breathing too hard for someone just sitting there.

Every day he would have to take that pill. Maybe more, if that dosage was too small. It was the lowest one they had, but the highest one was _eight_ _times_ that. What if his disorder was so bad he had to take the maximum dose? What then?

 _Now isn’t the time to think about that. You won’t even know if_ this _dose is working until you’ve been taking it for two weeks. Move onto the next task._

He nodded to himself. Right. He needed to put that aside. Focus on what needed to happen now.

He got up and crossed the room to pick up the bottle from where it had rolled under the table. He would put it on his desk and take it before he started work for the day. And he did just that, very calmly, afterward standing in front of his monitors and looking at where he had placed below the leftmost ones.

_I don’t want to take it._

_You’ve spent enough time doing what you want to do. Now all that’s left is what you have to do._

“I really feel as though my life shouldn’t be this difficult,” he muttered, turning back to his digital mountain of unsorted information. The bottle seemed bright in the corner of his eye.

_It wouldn’t be if you had taken control of it sooner._

Touché.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don’t know anything about cigarettes, I just gave him the one that seemed the strongest.


	5. Part Five. The Asylum

**Part Five. The Asylum**

-

Today’s task: kill Edward Nygma.

Not literally, of course. But figuratively. As in, Edward needed to erase him from existence. Or, rather, erase all connections between Edward and… Edward from existence.

It wouldn’t be _too_ difficult. Edward Nygma, which in itself was an alias, did most things under numerous other names. It would be the biological evidence that would be the problem. He needed to find what little of it there was and destroy it. It would be held in two places: the GCPD evidence locker and what was left of Arkham Asylum.

After Ivy’s mutated (and disgusting) plants had torn through Arkham Asylum and infested the entirety of the grounds with mold and spores and a whole lot of other things Edward didn’t care to know about, the city had moved all of the inmates out and then just left the contents of the island to rot. Everything had been left behind because no one had wanted to expose themselves to whatever was floating around inside. Unfortunately, Edward was going to have to brave it. Once he began the task of legally separating himself from the Riddler, the prosecution would search _everywhere_ for evidence that he was. And he was. Obviously. But the onus would be on them to prove it, which he was not about to allow them to do. Hence the need to visit the Asylum.

He waited until late evening to make the trip. He wasn’t terribly concerned about getting caught – the Asylum was closed, broken down, and infested foundations to rafters with whatever deadly organisms Ivy had cooked up while she was there – but it was always prudent to exercise caution. Especially when one was breaking _into_ Arkham Asylum. No person up to anything unsuspicious did that.

The diner was still slumped in the shadow of the tattered bridge leading to the Asylum, just as abandoned as it had been all those years ago after the last time he had come by. He sat and stared out the windshield across the weed-choked parking lot towards the rundown building. It was liberally smeared with dirt, almost all of the windows he could see were broken, and the sign mounted to the top centre had collapsed onto the asphalt what seemed to have been a while back. Even if it had still been open at the time, it wouldn’t have had much patronage after the Asylum had closed. He himself had lost the incentive to go long before that.

He was standing in the dining room in front of the counter, three stools to the right of where he normally sat. His eyes were searching the backsplash and the countertop and what he could see of the tile floor for evidence, but there was none. Blood was bad for business. The cook was shrugging and telling him they had no idea why someone had stormed inside and shot Ainsley over the fact there was only sixty-five dollars in the cash register, and it didn’t make any sense at all but he was convinced it was because they had known she was working for him.

That hadn’t been the reason. The killer, when Edward had confronted him, had neither known who he was nor even that Ainsley was dead. It had been an honest coincidence, nothing more. Even so, he rarely got personal with any of his informants after that.

He pressed an N-95, left over from the truck restoration, to his face and secured it around the back of his head. He then retrieved the flashlight he’d brought from the passenger seat, pushed open the door, and got out. Enough reminiscing, if what he was doing could be called that. He had work to do.

The bridge, which had never been in good repair, now complained the presence of both his every step and every gust of wind that wended its way around the neglected metal. The gate, when he reached it, had been pulled down and warped by the weight of the plants that had laid claim to it. The right side was nearly invisible beneath a copious swath of leaves. He made his way over the tangle, doing his best to avoid the places where the dark knotting of the vines swallowed any attempt to be penetrated by the flashlight beam. Once past that obstacle, he looked up towards the buildings sprawled across the grounds. The first place he needed to go was not the room where the records were kept nor the basement where the inmates’ articles were kept. No, he needed to make a visit to the security station in Intensive Treatment. He doubted there were anything of import in there, but he needed to be sure. It was, after all, diagonally proximate to the last cell he’d lived in.

The floor was choked thoroughly with vines and leaves and all manner of other things he had no desire to step on, so when he finally entered the room he went only as far as he had to and instead reached over it all to open the drawers of the desk, flashlight held high in his other hand. All of the paper inside was destroyed. Mold, and a lot of it. He wrinkled his nose involuntarily and pushed himself back to standing using the edge of the desk. What he intended to do next was turn around, exit Intensive Treatment, and head off to the record room in Arkham Mansion, but what he did instead was look through the smudged and shattered glass of the security station towards his old home sweet home. The flashlight’s beam did not reach nearly that far, but he didn’t need it to.

He was standing in the centre of his cell and staring up at the filthy tile. They’d given him something that had put his mind all out of order and because it was out of order he didn’t know how to put it back to the way it had been. They were punishing him for writing on the walls. They were punishing him for _damaging_ the walls. He’d done it because he was angry. He was always angry but he tried not to show them that. Tried not to show _anyone_ that. They wouldn’t give him anything to write with or write on but he _needed to_ so he had had to use one of the broken wall tiles to cut into his own leg. His mind was more on the way the blood running down the back of his hand both smothered and emphasised the myriad lines of his skin than on what he was writing, and by the time he had really fathomed _just_ _how much_ blood there was someone was throwing him to the ground and yelling in his ear about how he was stupid _and_ suicidal and he was yelling in _their_ ear, asking what they had expected him to do when they had taken away his mind and given him nothing to fill it with, and it was only when he was in the straightjacket and forced onto his feet that he realised they hadn’t understood anything he had said because it had all been in French.

That had been the only time he had not argued against a therapy session. If they believed he was suicidal he would be sent to Solitary. He had just gotten out of Solitary. He couldn’t go in there again. So he had cooperated. Once. And when they had returned him to his cell after he’d passed the evaluation he had sat there on the bed and looked at the wall where the words as been, just as he was doing from the hallway now.

It was the one time the fact the general public thought him a raving maniac had worked to his advantage. None of the people working that day had known what he was saying, nor had they had the ability to identify what language he was saying it in. And they had probably had a good chortle over what they thought was nonsense on the wall, which incensed him even now, but it was better this way. His secret was still safe.

Unless Jonathan told someone.

He pushed back the temptation to take a deep breath and turned back towards the hallway. He needed to get going. He was here to destroy the DNA evidence the Asylum held, not steep himself in memories he wished he could forget. The scar had faded quite a lot over the years, but he still knew where it was. It was still a reminder of the day he had let them get to him. 

Across the Island and through the plants into the mansion proper he went, down towards the basement where all of the things they took were kept, and the closer he got the harder it was to breathe. Not because of the plants. A little because of the plants. It was in an entirely different building, but his mind kept turning back to Solitary Confinement. He glanced in the approximate direction of it, and though he knew it was not there he almost felt as though it were, somehow, lurking in the dark behind the twisting vines and torn up floor tiles and the places his flashlight beam inexplicably could not breach. Even if it had been there, he didn’t need to see it. It, like everything else, was all clear in his mind’s eye.

He was in Solitary Confinement and the Asylum was speaking to him. It was telling him he wasn’t real. It was saying that his breaths were the passage of air through its vents and his pulse was the thrum of electricity hidden in the walls and if he closed his eyes the Asylum would show him the reality his lying brain didn’t want him to see. But he didn’t. He counted the wall tiles over and over and over again with his fingers crammed into his ears so he could hear and feel the subtle friction of them next to his eardrums, the straightjacket he’d broken out of still tight around his waist, and some deep down part of him whispered that if he kept doing that, if he just kept doing that, he would not lose what and who and why he was to the rotten, grasping will of the Asylum.

_“Edward, the threat of Solitary is solely up to the occupant. You only take in with you what you have. If you bring fear, you will be trapped in there with it. I’m not afraid of the dark.”_

_“What_ are _you afraid of?”_

_“For now, nothing. But we can only steel ourselves against that which we know, and I do not know everything.”_

Edward wasn’t afraid of the dark. He didn’t keep a light on in the hallway or need to have his bedroom door locked up tight, and he’d never even slept with a gun beneath his pillow like so many others of his ilk did. There was no need to fear something he knew everything about. But in Solitary… things came out of the dark. Things he didn’t know anything about. Things he couldn’t even tell whether they were real. He had been in Solitary for forty-seven consecutive days before Sabrina had gotten him out of Blackgate and he had hated every single second of it, but he would rather have done it all over again three times over than ever go back to that cell in the Asylum. He had been there for three days but the first twelve hours had been too much. 

He hated Ivy and the Joker equally, but he had to admit the two of them combined were the best thing to ever happen to the Asylum. He wasn’t going back to Blackgate. Not now and not ever. But in the sliver of a statistical anomaly in which he failed in every aspect of his task, at least he would never be sent back to the Asylum. 

The storage lockers in the basement had not been in good condition to begin with, but now they were crawling with not only clinging plants but also a liberal amount of orange-brown rust. He moved the flashlight up to squint at the faded names written on yellowed labels with whatever Sharpie the archivist had had in their pocket at the time. He frowned at the place his name _should_ have been. He spelled it Nygma so that he wouldn’t _have_ to waste time filtering through half the Ns and could instead merely go one or two places back from the Os, but of _course_ no one cared about that. Of _course_ everyone was simply going to elect to spell his name wrong for the entirety of his life. Oh, the variations on Édouard his teachers had come up with…

Having located the appropriate locker, he stuck his fingers into the recess where the lock was meant to go and yanked it open. This turned out to be a mistake, as it immediately sprayed a large amount of dust and spores directly into his face. The mask thankfully protected him from the onslaught of minute particles. If he started coughing in here, he might as well spend his last remaining minutes writing out his will. He lifted the flashlight to the darkness of the locker, which revealed four boxes on four separate shelves. He pulled the top one out and, bracing his foot against the lowermost shelf, balanced it against the third box and –

… four boxes?

He looked down at the box across his knee. Perhaps he shouldn’t open it.

_They don’t mean anything._

“This one does.”

 _No._ None _of them mean anything. It’s a_ superstition. 

“If I’d listened – “

_You can’t know that._

No. No, he couldn’t.

 _But you_ do _need to know what’s in these boxes. They could sink your entire future if you leave them here._

He nodded, but he still couldn’t open it. Four. Four was bad. Four was not bad. Four was catastrophe. 

_Then think of a way around it._

He stepped back and pulled out the last box with his free hand, removing the lid. It was only half-full. Exactly as he’d hoped. He dumped the contents into the first box and put the now-empty one on top of the storage lockers. Now there was three and one. It wasn’t ideal but it was better than four.

He pushed enough of the vines out of the way that he could put the other two boxes on the floor so he could look through them all at once. They mostly contained his effects, which he would have to take just in case they had trace evidence on them. A single hair could be his undoing. Some suits, whatever he’d had in his pockets at the time. Not much else. Anything he needed he generally took with him when he left. He pressed all of it into two boxes as best he could and shoved the two empty ones back into the locker. If anyone came in here looking for evidence they would know they’d been beaten. He smiled a little thinking about it, about an army of police officers and a desperate attorney forcing their way through the infected filth of the Asylum into the basement to find that he had thoroughly wasted their time. He could see them blustering away in court about it already.

He had stepped out into the hallway with the boxes when he realised there was another locker he needed to check. Jonathan’s. He should take those things too, just in case. He was again missing and presumed dead, but one couldn’t be too careful.

Jonathan had been in the Asylum just twice. After he’d been brought back following his one and only escape attempt they had destroyed his costume, so all that was in his solitary box were the clothes he had arrived there in. The old man would probably appreciate having them back he decided, throwing the musty clothes on top of the boxes, all of which he then took back upstairs. He needed next to locate his physical files. There was the off chance they contained his fingerprints. He’d destroyed all the digital files years ago, but paper ones were a bit trickier once one was no longer on location.

The filing room again saw his name spelled wrong, and he bit on his tongue to keep himself from sighing in annoyance. He pulled the folder out of the drawer and followed it with the one on Jonathan. He added them to his stack and made his way back outside. He kept going until he was at the very edge of Arkham Island, where he put all of it down and reached into his pocket for his lighter. He was tempted to take off his mask but one glance downward told him that would be a bad idea. The plants were present even here, a ways from the Asylum they had taken primary root in. The otherwise still air was punctuated by a periodic rustle or creak or slither caused by them.

He picked up his folder, intending to light it first, but curiosity got to him and he found himself removing the flashlight from his back pocket and opening it. The opening page contained the expected basic information, and the one after was… notes from his first therapist.

_Edward should be in Blackgate. Not because he is not ill – he is, very much so – but because this facility has inadequate resources to contain him._

Obviously. Though escaping anywhere wasn’t that hard; you merely had to have something other people wanted. Information and money were things Edward always had in abundance.

 _His lawyer insists he exhibits signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but conveniently these symptoms seem only to come up when he is undergoing a psych evaluation._

Because psych evaluations were the only time anyone tried to trigger it. It wasn’t as though he needed to count on all of his fingers and toes. He’d been doing it so long he could do it with little more than a glance.

_Edward does, however, display narcissistic tendencies to an irritating degree. He is manipulative, feels the need to control every conversation to prove his dominance over authority, and takes even hints at theoretical inadequacies extremely personally._

Of course he did. They always sat him across from idiots who thought they were the first ones to try to get his personal history out of him. They got a slightly different version of the puzzle story every time and that was all they would ever get.

 _However, he_ is _aware that there is something wrong. It is rare to hit upon a subject that inspires that sort of… primal fear of being flawed in him, but they exist. If Edward ever finds a reason to sit down and face that fact, there may yet be hope for him to recover. But it will take a doctor with far more skill, time, and willingness than I have to get him there. I am not sure such a doctor exists._

“So you gave up,” he muttered at the page in front of him. “You probably had that kind of track record with _all_ your patients.” He flipped it aside and read the next one.

_Edward is insufferable, irritating, and goes on tangents unrelated to the subject at hand merely because it amuses him. I have refrained from a diagnosis because he is not a man interested in anything other than playing games with others to prop up his inflated sense of superiority. I recommend he be removed from therapy entirely, so as to better utilise the bare resources of the Asylum on those who can actually be helped._

‘Refrained from a diagnosis’? He hadn’t even bothered to _try_? Edward had been justified in dismissing him outright. They could agree on one thing: therapy was absolutely a waste of everyone’s time.

_Edward is a lost cause. His intelligence is a towering roadblock that casts a shadow on his potential for recovery. It provides too much stability for what would, in someone else, be a mild case of narcissism, but in him it lends credence to his belief that he is better than everyone else. Because, in many literal ways, he is. This, coupled with his perfect recall, renders most conversations with him pointless. Edward will resist treatment until such time as he is forced to realise – and care – that he is disliked, friendless, and unpopular. His lawyer seems to actually like him, which implies he can behave like a regular human being when he wants to, but until he wants to more often I’m afraid there’s nothing anyone can do for him._

“Why would I _want_ to be like _that_?” he demanded, throwing up his free hand. “You said yourself I _wasn’t_ a regular human being, so why should I pretend I am? Because it would make everyone else feel better?”

_Consider this my resignation._

That was it. That was all it said. This doctor had taken one look at who he’d been assigned to next and handed in his two weeks. They’d all given up on him. The last doctor before he’d even _met_ him. It didn’t matter. He didn’t need them. He’d never needed them. He could handle himself. 

He was folded underneath the dining room table, his arms tight around his knees. His parents were arguing above him. His mother was screaming that she _had_ to hit him because it was the only way to make him listen, and his father was yelling about all the things he’d had to give up for his sake, and he was looking at the stairs and wondering if he would make it without them seeing him. His mother was saying she was done, that she had given up on him, and his father was saying she could _not_ leave him to deal with him alone. His knee hurt because she had kicked it. His cheek hurt because she had slapped it. His report card was on the floor. It was crumpled. His father picked it up and told him to come out, and when he did his father said one thing:

_“Vous as intérêt à les valoir.”_

You had better be worth it.

He closed the folder slowly. That cause was lost. What was more important was what had come before: he had always failed to remember anything about his mother. His perfect recall seemed to have begun the day his mother had disappeared and not a single memory sooner. He had no recollection of anything that had happened before one evening at the age of eight. No birthdays, no Christmases, no first days of school or summer vacations or afternoons spent in the snow. Nothing. Nothing at all. Except, now, for this new memory, wrenched out of seemingly nowhere to play behind his eyes.

He spun around to face the Asylum. It was that _house_! There was something wrong with it. Edward had known so upon his very first foot inside of it. 

_It’s just a house, Eddie._

Was it, though?

 _It isn’t_ haunted _._

“No,” he said, eye tracing the way the clock tower seemed to reach up and embed itself in the darkened sky, “but it’s a fact that people are brought in there and come out a different person entirely.”

 _But the_ house _didn’t do anything to them. Everything that goes on inside of it did._

Everything didn’t constantly go wrong in there by simple coincidence. There had to be some other reason.

_Now would be a good time to realise you’re being superstitious. Again._

He could set this whole island ablaze. It would be gone. It would go up in flame and then it would sink down into the water and nobody would ever set foot on it again. 

_“You threw the cigarette in the trash can.”_

_“The paper recycling, actually.”_

_“… why?”_

_“They were being rude. I got tired of it. I mean, everyone could see they had fries. They simply didn’t want to give them to you.”_

_“You… burned down a building because they were being rude?”_

_“What do you care? It’s exactly the sort of thing you would do. Why does it matter if I do it?”_

‘It matters because it isn’t like you’ had been the answer, but Edward had not been ready to hear it. All right. He wouldn’t burn down the Asylum. He would burn only these things and then he would go.

Jonathan’s file he put aside – he would let Jonathan decide what to do with that – but the rest of it he set alight in several places with his ever-present lighter and watched it all curl and crumble in silence. He’d sort of expected something profound to happen while he was doing it, but nothing. Just the crackle and what acridity made it through the mask.

When the fire petered out he kicked what was left into the water and made his way back up to the grounds proper. He found his eye moving up the height of the Asylum again. He needed to do something before he could go, but what?

A few minutes later he was standing inside of the plant-torn floor of his cell and he was writing on the wall with a red marker he had stolen from the desk in the security office across the hall. Though was it really _stealing_ when the building was abandoned and the owners long dead? When he was finished, he put the marker back into the drawer – everything in its place, and all that – and made his way back outside. 

He still wasn’t certain why the phrase had struck him so much. He had seen it all over edgy French blogs many years back, all of them posting about boyfriends who didn’t deserve them or who had been their one and only, yadda yadda yadda, a phrase written on a concrete wall in lieu of posting a sad selfie complete with strategically streaked emo makeup. But then he’d found a different blog. A photo gallery of a prison-turned-museum in _Trois-Rivières_ , including a picture of that phrase written upon the back of a cell smaller than his next to a crack running down a yellow wall:

_J’ai aime - j’ai souffert – maintenant - je hais._

_That_ had been a man who had understood the world, Edward thought as he walked back across the bridge, Jonathan’s file and clothes pinched under his arm as he cleaned his glasses with a handkerchief. He wondered if he would have cared that his profundity had been co-opted by sad teenagers who didn’t understand the true meaning of _any_ of those words. If he would have cared that his words were still there on the wall for any gawping tourist to read and think and pretend _I know how you feel_. That people were taking pictures of it and using it as their avatar or their Facebook header or their quote of the day and other people were praising them for finding what someone else had written and not even bothering to care where it had come from. Would _he_ care, if some bored rich moron decided to clean up Arkham Island and repurpose the mansion as a museum showcasing the extra-special brand of loonies you could find only in Gotham City? If that happened, he probably _would_ have to burn it down. If someone else didn’t first. The whole thing was a fire hazard anyway. The place didn’t even have a suppressant system. Not so much as a lengthy coil of garden hose. Any fire trucks, which would take so long to arrive they’d be just in time to see the place collapse into ashes, would be manned with either the foolishly selfless or the kind of person who liked to pretend they were helping so they had a clear view of the carnage. He doubted a single person in all of Gotham would be sorry to see the place go.

When he got back to the apartment he took a shower and then ate some cucumber sandwiches whilst staring at Jonathan’s file, placed on the very centre of the kitchen table. He put his thumb on the bottom corner to open it five times but did so none. It was Jonathan’s file. Whatever was in there was Jonathan’s secret. Edward’s specialty was secrets, the juicier the better, and the contents were sure to be something that was between only Jonathan and whomever had evaluated him. He realised he was bouncing his leg up and down and forced himself to stop. He wasn’t going to open it. Not Jonathan’s. Anyone’s but Jonathan’s.

He left it there and got ready for bed. It may have been an illusion, but the tinnitus did not seem so bad tonight. That made him think about the memory he’d had, and he realised it was different from all the others. His memories were usually as clear as if he was there, but the one with his mother in it… he couldn’t hear her voice. It was there, but it didn’t have a sound. He remembered the words and the volume, but not how they had been said. And it wasn’t just that, either; he could remember the scratched linoleum in front of him, and his parents’ legs, and the path to the stairs beyond them, but nothing _around_ those things. It was a very specific, yet vague, snippet of existence. His brows came together.

Was that what memory was _supposed_ to be like? He couldn’t decide if it were better or worse than having perfect recall. On the one hand, not being able to remember every glorious and gritty detail about everything he’d ever witnessed would probably help keep his thoughts in order… but on the other, the _doubt_ people with imperfect memories must have had! Edward _always_ knew what he had said or done or seen at any given time. But most people had to simply… guess.

_“I’d always thought having an eidetic memory would be terrible. Every detail about everything all the time. Seems a curse. You must often remember what you’d rather keep out of mind.”_

“It was,” he said, even though this had happened years ago and Jonathan was not there and Jonathan had admitted mere moments later he hadn’t even meant it. “But I didn’t understand yet that it wasn’t.” 

Well. When he was remembering things he _wanted_ to remember, anyway. Trying to bring back to mind his mother’s voice wasn’t any easier now than it had been when he’d had no clues about it whatsoever. He could not even come up with what colour her socks had been! They were simply… socks!

It didn’t matter. He wanted to know because he _didn’t_ know, and that was all. She was unimportant. Giving up on him was her loss. It was _all_ of their loss, all of them! The fact that so many people had discarded him was actually _good_ news. It let him know with absolute certainty which few truly deserved his attention. He didn’t need to waste his effort on people who had written him off for arbitrary reasons, such as some quarterly report card he’d brought home at the age of eight. He didn’t need a piece of paper to tell _him_ he was a genius. And his parents would have known that too, if they’d bothered to pay attention to him other than to smack him around. 

His father had stopped his mother from beating him. How ironic. Almost funny, actually. The both of them were violent Neanderthals who blamed him for all of their life’s woes as though he had come to them in a vision and asked nicely if they could bring him into the world so he could wilfully derail the entirety of the rest of their lives. But that had been their _choice_. According to the vision he had had under the fear toxin, his father had once read engineering journals. No layperson did that. Therefore, he had once had aims to become an engineer. Therefore, the fact that he was to this day still a drunken, angry bartender had nothing to do with Edward. Edward had been gone for a long, long time. His father could have turned his life around at any given moment after that. He had simply chosen not to.

 _But I_ am _choosing to._

He moved onto his back. He had removed himself from the Asylum; the next, and more difficult, hurdle was the evidence locker at the GCPD. He needed to look into whom he still had down there. Not many. But there only needed to be one. Everyone had their price and Edward _always_ found out what it was. Tomorrow he would figure that out and sift through the information he’d been sent about the vigilante both.

And maybe later in the week he would go to see Jonathan. If he wasn’t too angry. He probably wouldn’t be. No, he definitely would be. But he wouldn’t do anything about it. He would be happy to see Edward, even if he didn’t show it for a single second. He glanced up at the clock. Three am. He grimaced. Wonderful. This was _exactly_ what he needed right now.

When sleep finally came, it brought with it a dream of Blackgate as crystal clear as if he were truly there in-person. He was being led in handcuffs down a hallway towards… no. No no no, not now. Not again.

“I haven’t done anything!” he protested, and the unseen person pushing him forward with an iron grip on his lower arm restrained behind his back snorted.

“You will. Your kind always does.”

“You can’t –“ But they apparently could, and they were, because whomever was behind him pushed him into the solitary confinement cell and closed the door with what was definitely not an imagined foreboding clang. He looked at the narrow slit in the door with intentions of memorising the face of the man who had decided to put him in here, but… it had _changed._ He looked behind him in a panic to find exactly what he was expecting: the stained and torn padded walls of the confinement cell at Arkham Asylum.

“No,” he whispered, shaking his head, but he could tell through the slivers of light making it around the cracks in the door that it was so. The straitjacket that had somehow materialised around him was making it increasingly difficult to breathe and the walls led up and up and up to a ceiling that was so far distant it may well have not been there at all. And as the cold that had always seemed to emanate from the very foundations of the Asylum began to penetrate his skin he knew, suddenly, why that was: he was going to be down here forever and no one was ever going to come for him.

He startled awake to understand why, exactly, breathing had become so difficult: his face was pressed wholly into his pillow. He’d started smothering himself again. He pushed himself onto one bent elbow and allowed himself a moment like that to catch his breath. He coughed a little and then moved onto his back.

His plan was going to work. He was not going back to Blackgate and he was _certainly_ not going back to the derelict Asylum. He had nothing to worry about. Even if his subconscious seemed to think otherwise. Even if the remembered chill of the Asylum seemed to have settled into his real-life bones suddenly.

Still. As he tilted his phone to check approximately how long he had slept – an hour and a half – he realised there was something about the dream he had taken as a given but which was unprecedented and yet incredibly distressing:

Sabrina would have been the one who wasn’t coming.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author’s note
> 
> Note for this story (and my series in general): while it does state in the character files section of the Arkhamverse games that Riddler’s real name is Edward Nashton, the games themselves don’t actually have an explanation for how anyone figured this out and on top of that everyone calls him ‘Nygma’, unlike every other person they know the real last name of. In Arkham Origins if you go talk to Alfred about a billion times after you finish all the Enigma stuff, he will say he found out who Enigma was, but that makes absolutely zero sense considering Alfred had no way of doing that. Considering both that AND the fact that the Enigma character file actually isn’t complete unless you’re willing to sit there and fly in and out of the Batcave constantly which I really doubt most players ever did, I don’t consider that to be canon. Therefore, for my intents and purposes nobody knows his real last name is Nashton.
> 
> J’ai aimé, j’ai souffert, maintenant, je hais was written on the wall (in blood) in Edward’s cell in Arkham Asylum in the game’s promotional screenshots, but for unknown reasons this never made it into the final game. At first glance someone might suppose Edward was just being both pretentious and edgy, as he is sometimes, but after trawling the Internet for about an hour I discovered where it was originally from. It is actually real-life graffiti written on the wall in a prison cell in La Vielle Prison de Trois-Rivières, which was Canada’s longest operating prison until it was closed in 1986. They reopened it as a museum in 2003 so if you happen to live anywhere near Trois-Rivières, you may be able to go and see it for yourself. 
> 
> According to the Wikipedia page it was a shitty place to be and apparently has dungeons. My guess is that the team who made Arkham Asylum needed a tour of a real-life old prison to model the in-game Arkham Asylum after and that was one of the ones they went to.


	6. The Trap

**Part 6. The Trap**

-

His plans of re-establishing some semblance of order to his life were not going very well.

The biggest problem was that sleep was suddenly very hard to come by. At first he attributed it to the tinnitus, but after a few more days of increasing fatigue he had to conclude that wasn’t the culprit. At least, it wasn’t the only one. As the week wended by he ruled out the potential causes: bad physical health, diet, and overall environment. This left only one other suspect: the sertraline.

It did make the most sense. Sort of. It didn’t seem to be doing much of anything, since his… behaviours had not changed at all. Then again, he had only actually taken it three times in total. And it would be just his luck that the side effects would appear so quickly while the purported benefits took significantly longer to take effect.

A quick check of the relevant listing on a drug database revealed his suspicion to be true: sertraline did cause insomnia in twenty percent of patients. His lips tightened. Wonderful. It was supposedly temporary, but how long was that? Before or after he was driven completely insane by the paradox of being utterly exhausted but unable to sleep?

What was it Jonathan did about this? He’d had medication for it which he had scarce used because it gave him terrible headaches, and the rest of the time he merely… didn’t even try to fall asleep. As far as Edward knew his usual method was simply to read until he went unconscious. That was not going to work for Edward given he did not have any books on hand, so he would have to come up with some other low-impact activity to engage himself in when the time to give up on staring at the ceiling had come.

That had been three days ago, and on the second day he had had to admit he had perhaps overblown the benefits of working while standing at his desk a smidge. He seemed to be developing a sharp pain in his lower back that did not appear when he was sitting down, including right now. He was concerned the chair he’d decided on was a little _too_ comfortable, but he could always alternate between sitting in it and leaning one of his knees on it while he was standing. 

As the evening wore on he became too tired to really concentrate on what he was doing and so had been sitting in it and sort of staring at the wall, wondering what, exactly, he had once done when he had had free time that would count as ‘low-impact’ and coming up very, very short. His leisure time had obviously dwindled to nearly nothing over the years. If he’d had any he would have given it up in favour of sleeping, which he genuinely enjoyed doing. But of course he had eventually barely come up with enough hours to even do that, which was less a hobby than it was a necessity. Farther back than that was… he’d played EVE Online whenever he had a minute, back before the whole Arkham City thing, but there was a reason it was colloquially known as a spreadsheet simulator. Spreadsheets _were_ fun, but not exactly sleep-inducing. He folded his arms and tightened one corner of his mouth momentarily. There must have been _something_ he had once –

He sat up. He remembered now. Hockey. Good _Lord_ that had been a long time ago. It had been so long they probably didn’t even play the game by the rules he’d spent a good afternoon carefully committing to memory. He’d once been limited to sitting on the living room floor the evenings the schedules of his father and the NHL coincided, the volume low enough his alert left ear could hear a key being fit into the front door lock, but all of that now, too, was different. Including the fact that the Internet was an entity which laughed at the mere _idea_ of a schedule. It was of course quite simple to quickly approximate the appropriate websites, but he found himself hesitating to click on any of them. It wasn’t until he realised he was thinking about what his _other_ ear had been listening to back then that he understood.

He’d always watched hockey in French.

He stared sightlessly at the blue links in front of him. Did he really want to go down that road? Really. After all, that had been a part of himself he’d been attempting to get rid of since he was in _middle school_. He barely even thought in French anymore. Sometimes. But not very often. Not enough to be significant, anyway.

 _This isn’t_ about _hockey, Eddie_ , he reminded himself. _It’s about_ sleeping. If nostalgia was the road he needed take to get there, the French broadcast it would be.

He didn’t know any of the players. He didn’t know any of the announcers, and the league appeared to have added several entire new teams to their roster that he did not recognise in the slightest. But the sound of the skates cutting through the ice and the slap of the sticks against the puck… he remembered that. He remembered a time when they were his skates and his stick. It had been a good time.

He was sitting in his coach’s office where he’d been sent after the game had ended, still somewhat flush with exertion. His coach had not at all mentioned what this was going to be about, but he was hoping for _some_ sort of recognition for how well he’d done tonight. His coach had told him that, back in the locker room, but he’d said that to _everyone_ even though Edward’s fellow defensemen had definitely dropped the metaphorical ball what was clear to _him_ to have been _far_ too many times. This wasn’t Edward’s first special meeting with the coach and they had never before been about his performance, but he couldn’t imagine what else he would have been sent here about.

About five minutes later his coach was sitting behind the desk across from him, which was long enough that he had counted everything within eyesight: two whiteboards, two diplomas, seventeen books across three shelves, three knickknacks on the metal desktop accompanied by five pens in a coffee cup decorated with the faded logo of the hockey team. He was folding his hands together and sighing and Edward was suddenly very aware of what was going to come next. It was the same thing it had been the last time, and the time before that, and the time before that.

His coach was telling him very seriously about how he had done all he could, but he was not going to be able to keep him on the team very much longer. That he didn’t understand why Edward was doing so poorly in everything except French, as that made it very clear to him that Edward _could_ do better, he just… wasn’t. He had advocated for Edward as long and as hard as he could, but there wasn’t anything else he could do. He felt cold suddenly and was acutely aware of the fact that his hair had all but dried into a sweat-infused tangle. There were five scuffed linoleum tiles between each leg of the desk. His coach had gone silent and remained so until Edward looked up to see why, and when he accidentally met his eyes his coach asked:

“I’m going to ask you one last time, Eddie: is there trouble at home?”

Even if it had not been the fourth time he had asked, Edward would have said no the same as he had the first three times. What else _was_ there to say? He’d been well aware that he was not one of the few who got to live out a fairy tale. There would be no last-minute miracle where he was suddenly able to pass all of his classes with effortless flying colours and there would be no visit from a kind and empathetic social worker who would whisk him away to some gentle and nurturing family to live out his days happily ever after. It was simply what he had to put up with until he figured out what something better was and how he was going to achieve it.

And achieve it he had.

He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes and listened to the commentary describing what was playing out in front of him. They were only words, obviously, but the shape and the nuance and the cadence of them… there was something that separated it from all the other languages he had learned. As though there was something intrinsic to the first one a man knew that gave it some depth no other one would ever, ever have.

_It wasn’t the French you didn’t like. It was everything else that came with it._

If he started thinking about all of that right now, he was _never_ going to get any sleep. He looked back up at the monitor. One of the commentators was opining over footage of the penalty box about the Canadiens’ abysmal recent performance and he almost laughed. He had managed to choose the exact wrong time to start watching again. Oh well. The victory following a string of losses was all the sweeter, and _that_ he knew from intimate personal experience.

He sat there for a few minutes more, a little preoccupied by the impression something was not quite right. As though he’d nearly solved his problem but for a missing link he hadn’t noticed yet. He looked around the room merely as a thinking tactic, which worked beautifully: he had not given his brain any environmental cues to induce sleep. He was in his pyjama pants, yes, but he was also sitting in an office chair watching television. He glanced back towards the bedroom. If he brought a blanket in here, it was just going to end up on the floor and probably torn up beneath the wheels of the chair. He already knew there was nothing suitable in his suitcase, but perhaps something had ended up in Jonathan’s. Ada _had_ been in there, after all. He got up and pulled it out from under the bed, unzipping it once he had. 

It was mostly as he had left it, albeit the first few shirts were shoved in as opposed to neatly folded. He sighed and took all of the clothes out so he could replace them properly. When he realised what he was doing he stopped and rubbed his eyes for a minute. Well, it was too late to stop himself now. He looked back down at the hooded grey sweatshirt he was in the process of folding for the second time. Come to think of it, there was something unusual about it. He held it up in front of him. He had no idea what Jonathan had weighed back in the Stone Age when he had been a student, but he was incredibly certain it had been less than this shirt was designed to contain. That, and the fact that he doubted Jonathan would ever so much have glanced towards the overpriced campus store at the University of Atlanta, told him it had probably been stolen. He stared at it for a minute.

It wasn’t a blanket, but it was the closest he was going to get.

He finished putting the rest of the clothes away and replaced the suitcase beneath the bed, afterward picking up the sweatshirt and bringing it into the other room. It smelled terrible, which could have been for any reason from the musty pilfered suitcase it had just been festering in to Jonathan not having washed it in literal years. For the sake of his own sanity he was going to conclude it was because it had been in storage for so long that any effect from its last dose of laundry detergent had worn off. He pulled it on and sat down in the chair again. The Canadiens had been scored on again while he’d been gone, but the score being five and oh made him feel better for some reason.

He missed whether or not they somehow managed to muster up a miracle because he fell asleep for about four hours, which was not ideal but better than nothing. Sort of. His back hurt and one of his feet had gone numb, which tended not to happen when he slept in a bed and were not pleasant things to wake up to. He leaned forward and planted his elbows on the desk and rubbed at the corners of his eyes. For a long moment he felt as though he was just barely holding onto something that was attempting to twist desperately away, and he looked at the blurred bridge of his fingers over his nose until it passed. Even if that had been representative of reality – which it wasn’t – it was not the time. He needed to do what he did best, which was examine the myriad threads of the city and weave together those which benefitted him. Imagining them slipping from his fingers would be the opposite of helpful.

His morning tasks went rather uneventfully, as they should have, that was until he was sitting at the kitchen table with a cigarette moving through the fingers of his left hand as his eyes were set upon one lone dose of sertraline. He couldn’t tell if his throat literally closed up when he got the damn pills out of the bottle or if he were somehow imagining it. He had gotten it eight days ago and he had taken it three times. He couldn’t decide if having taken it the fourth time on the fourth day would have been worse then it seemed taking it the fourth time on the eighth day would be. 

That was the point of taking it, though. Two fours was neither better nor worse than three fours. They were just fours. To everyone else, apparently. He went out the back door, lit the cigarette, and took a long drag off of it. He hated this more than he had hated most things. He could not _believe_ his own damned brain was making such a colossal idiot out of him. Being outside brought with it the realisation it was worse than he’d thought it was. It seemed to be later in the morning than he’d expected it to be and a check of his phone confirmed it. The rituals involved in exercising, showering, and getting dressed had taken two hours. It would have been even longer if he’d actually gone to bed last night! As he tossed the end of the cigarette into the street he shook his head and thanked his lucky stars he did not have to go anywhere. 

Back in the kitchen he retrieved a bottle of water and set it down, uncapped, next to the pill, sitting down in the chair in front of them. This was stupid. He was going to just do it. He was just going to swallow it with some water like it was no big deal, because it _was_ no big deal. 

… but apparently it was, because he had it in his mouth for so long that a bitter tang had begun to spread across his tongue. He put it back on the table and stared at it. A heavy disappointment with himself was beginning to come over him, like a shadow that grew longer over the course of a winter afternoon. He had accomplished so many things in his life and yet he was being defeated by a little green pill. Disgraceful. Why couldn’t he do it? What did that _say_ about him? His throat was beginning to contract just _looking_ at it. 

_Maybe I really_ do _need psychological help._

Oh, no. Oh, no no no. This was going much too far now. All right. New plan. He was not going to think about it while he was doing it. He was going to think about absolutely anything else, and while he wasn’t paying attention he would swallow it and that would be that. He could move on with his morning. The morning that had already taken far too long to play out.

It took another minute or two but that plan did come to fruition. Sort of. He drank a little more of the water but the trail the pill seemed to have seared into his esophagus did not dissipate in the slightest. It was impossible and he knew it was impossible and yet he still could have sworn he could feel it down there, burning a hole in the bottom of his stomach. It was not doing that, of course. It was waiting patiently to be dissolved into his bloodstream so it could take control of his brain because he could not do it himself. 

He’d leant over the table and put his face into one of his hands without noticing.

_I want to give up._

It was a stupid thought and, worse, it didn’t even mean anything. Give up? Give up what? Give up and _do_ what? He was having one of his fleeting, unfounded moments of self-doubt. Give up, ha! Edward Nygma did not give up. He never had before and he wasn’t going to now.

_That’s what got you into this mess._

“And it’s what’s going to get me out of it,” he said with finality. And he walked over to his desk, propping one of his knees on the chair, to check his recent messages. One of them was from an informant regarding a seemingly aimless server breach at the office he worked at. In the past, these sorts of things were usually perpetrated by one particular person. One who worked for Batman.

He tapped one of his index fingers on the key it was nearest in sets of three until he made himself stop. He had broken into Batman’s communications multiple times without that much trouble, so he had no doubt he could do it again right now. He shoved the chair away with his knee and put that foot back on the floor. A plan was coming to him.

The longest part of the first phase turned out to be locating a transmission to break into in the first place. None of Batman’s little groupies put in quite the same hours he had, so it took a lot longer for one of his informants to sight one of them. Later in the evening when he was about ready to try and call it a night he finally did get a report back, and he wasted no further time in zeroing in on the relevant electronic signal. He was almost disappointed when accessing it proved no more difficult than it had any other time. 

He listened in for about twenty minutes or so, enough to approximate their communication patterns so he could act accordingly, and then muted it. He had a call to make, after all.

“Good evening,” he said when the person on the other end picked up. “What’s your schedule like this week?”

“ _Uh,_ ” they answered, which was not an encouraging start. “ _Same as always_.”

“Which is?” He drummed the fingers of his free hand against the desktop. Did this moron really think he went to the trouble of memorising the comings and goings of every single person in Gotham? Obviously he could if he had to, but why waste more brain power than absolutely necessary on the little people?

“ _Nights and I’m off Thursday_ ,” the informant said. It was Wednesday now.

“I’ll be there on Friday,” Edward told him, and it was fortunate he did not quite manage to hang up because the informant said,

“ _If you could wait until Sunday that would be better. They have a second guy on on Friday Saturday._ ”

“Very well,” said Edward, grimacing at the delay. “Sunday it is.”

He spent a few minutes deciding whether or not to call the next informant or to write them a suitably detailed email outlining what he needed them to do. Calling would be less likely to leave a trace. As a result it would have to wait until tomorrow afternoon, however. This one had kids.

//

He waited until her oldest would likely have been home from school to call, which was much later than he would have liked but sometimes it was best to work around their schedules even if he was inconvenienced. They were motivated to remain loyal that way. “ _Hello,_ ” she answered after a few rings, a little out of breath. “ _I wasn’t expecting to hear from you._ ”

“You should always expect to hear from me,” Edward told her. “It’s an easy one. You can do it from your phone.”

“ _Okay, shoot_ ,” the informant said, but before he could continue there was a crashing sound in the background and a child’s shrill scream. “ _I am so sorry, Mr Nygma, the dog is going to eat the glass if I –_ “

“Go ahead,” Edward interrupted, managing to sound quite patient and polite considering his annoyance with this interruption, and as he hitched himself up to sit on his desk he listened to her yell at the child for trying to pour the milk again while shooing the dog out of what he presumed to be the kitchen door.

“ _I told you to watch her!_ ” the informant shouted, closer to the phone this time. The reply, though not intelligible, carried enough clear resentment it was easy to conclude the woman’s teenager disagreed with being designated the babysitter. Given the other child was so stupid they had somehow broken a glass in an attempt to pour milk into it, Edward had to agree with his not wanting to be responsible for such a potato of a human being. _His_ children weren’t like that. Ada had never even seen milk and he was confident she –

Well… no. Ada was clumsy and she would spill it everywhere, afterward kicking the glass into the wall during her attempt to pick it up if it hadn’t shattered. And then she would collect the glass she could find, which would be only the largest pieces, and she wouldn’t tell him about it so he would walk into the room to find milk soaking into the floor and glass sinking into the bottom of his foot, after which he would –

“ _Mr Nygma?_ ” said the informant.

He didn’t know where his daughter was.

“ _I’ve dealt with all of… that_ ,” the woman said. He moved the phone away from his jaw long enough to take a measured breath.

“Good,” was what he came back with. “Now, I need you to listen very carefully. It’s very important you do this exactly as I tell you.”

//

He was getting out of the shower and thinking to himself about what he needed to do next and what order would be the most efficient and he discovered that his towel was not where he’d left it. That always meant one of his children had come in and moved it and he wondered for the nth time why they did not seem to understand what a closed door meant. He looked around for it, squinting due to the water in his eyes, to find Ada sitting on the counter holding it out to him. He sighed and thought about how she had at least not gotten bored and dropped it on the floor this time. 

He was not expecting an answer now because, though she had started talking, she still was not very conversational, but he asked her yet again what she was doing there anyway once he had towelled off his face. She tilted her head and said, as though it were something everyone except him already knew,

_I missed you, Dad._

When he opened his eyes again he was of course not in the bathroom at the Orphanage, but slumped so far sideways in his office chair he was unsure how he had not slipped out of it entirely. He slowly moved himself into a better sitting position and rubbed at his face. He doubted he would be sleeping any more tonight. A shake of the computer mouse revealed it was just past four on Friday morning and a heavy desolation settled in his chest. 

_She’s better off where she is._

_How do you know? You don’t even know_ where _she is._

“I know she’s not here,” he snapped, standing up. The floor was cold against his bare feet and he winced. He leaned under the desk and fished out the socks he’d kicked off in his sleep, throwing them down next to the keyboard at his main workstation. He sat down there once he’d retrieved a glass of water and a pack of black licorice from the kitchen, removing his headphones from the desk drawer and plugging them in to the computer. Might as well get some work done before the fatigue came back and made it hard to think.

His current task was to go through the recordings he had made of Oracle’s transmissions. It wouldn’t be difficult, but it would be time-consuming and probably boring. Fortunately, there weren’t a lot of words that sounded similar to ‘Riddler’ and so he could just raise the speed of the playback until he heard it.

That was the plan, and it worked very well for about five minutes. Around that time it began to get very difficult to concentrate on the sped-up words because the ringing in his ears seemed to be increasing in volume. Pausing the audio proved that it was not literally doing any such thing. It simply _appeared_ to the more he focused on it. 

He took a long drink of the water. Then he put the headphones back on and continued.

It took longer still than it should have because every time he started tuning out the audio in favour of the ringing, he had to stop the recording and rewind it to where he’d been when last he’d been paying attention, but after about twenty minutes more he heard his name and he sat up straight, lowering the playback speed to normal and running through his memory of the accelerated conversation in an attempt to pick out where the start of it had probably been. This also took far longer than it should have because the position of where he needed to listen had to be a prime number and he had to skip forward in increments of three. The whole thing seemed stupid and nonsensical even while he was doing it, but at the same time he got the impression that if he did not do it properly it would change the outcome of the conversation, somehow. As though the universe would change a history he had not yet witnessed if he tried to do so any other way.

_That doesn’t make any sense._

_Of course it does._

He finally managed to get the slider in the correct place and sat back in the chair to listen. “ _I got a message from one of Riddler’s informants,_ ” Barbara was saying. “ _She sounded very upset._ ”

“She was supposed to,” Edward said, picking up his glass.

“ _You know it’s probably a trap,”_ Robin cautioned.

“Me? Never.”

“ _She asked me to meet her, and I’m going to._ ”

“Alone?” Edward said at the exact same time as Robin, and he scowled and bit into his licorice. 

“ _How many informants have you known to squeal on Riddler? Especially when Batman’s not around?_ ”

“ _You know he_ has _been getting weird… er, though._ ”

“I am not _weird,_ ” Edward snapped, miffed. “And I wouldn’t throw stones if I were you, given the way you dress like a maniac whilst swooping around the city, hitting people with a stick.”

“ _Exactly. Could be this is legit. She wants out and wants to bargain what she knows for protection._ ”

“Mmhm,” Edward said. “Working the fryer at McDonald’s is _much_ more lucrative. _And_ much safer.” 

“ _If he shows up, I can always call you,_ ” Barbara said.

“And you think I’ll allow that _why_?”

“ _Barb, he could be in league with Scarecrow. Why else would he have been at the GCPD the night Scarecrow disappeared?”_

“Why indeed,” Edward said, tossing the licorice package onto the desk. “It wasn’t for the reason you think, though.” Ugh. He was going to need to… make up with him, which he was not looking forward to. There was the very real chance that Jonathan would not take him back this time. Edward had declared them over on so many occasions that this last incident may just have been the final straw, ha ha.

 _“It’ll be fine, Tim,”_ Barbara was saying. 

“ _As long as I get to say ‘I told you so’ when he shows up,_ ” said Tim, and the conversation turned to things Edward did not care about whatsoever. He sat back in the chair and took a drink of water. 

All right. She had taken the bait. She would be at the prearranged address at seven that evening. Unless she smartened up between now and then, this part of his plan would be easily executed. Given that was terribly unlikely, he was not too concerned. 

//

When the pertinent time arrived on Sunday evening, Edward made his way down the seven block distance from his apartment and his destination. His informant had told Barbara she would be waiting at a bus stop near there, and if Barbara went in the simplest possible direction – which she would – she would make her way down the street as inauspiciously as possible from right to left. He would await her on the roof of one of the nearby buildings, one where the lock holding the ladder up and away from persons such as himself had been broken off long ago. The sign attached to the front of the building was large enough that it would keep him from being noticed for the duration of his time up there. He checked his watch. Seven minutes. That was a good sign.

He wouldn’t be up there long, but it _was_ still quite chilly out given the time of year. He busied himself with pulling down his gloves and pulling up his socks, which he only belatedly noticed he had done three times each in alternation. Good Lord. He simply did just… do things like that without thinking about it. As though they were perfectly natural.

_They are to me._

He would have to debate that with himself later. Barbara was due to arrive within… three minutes. He removed his phone from his coat pocket and opened the relevant app. It would tell him if she were in open communication with anyone, which in turn would tell him whether he needed to stay put or if the plan could proceed. It seemed the cards were falling his way – of course – because she appeared exactly when she should have. She was stupid, but punctual, so he supposed she had that going for her. 

He waited until she seemed distracted with scanning the currently boarding bus in front of her for potential suspects, then climbed down the ladder and moved behind her, driving what he’d brought inside of her wheels. She immediately attempted to roll away, but was handily stopped.

“Good evening, my dear,” Edward said as he stepped into view. Barbara turned in an attempt to see what he had jammed her wheels with, but he was standing in the way.

“What’s that?” she asked, looking up at him instead. “Another Riddler cane?”

“I’m short on those at the moment,” Edward answered. “It’s actually the rod for my shower curtain.”

“As far as traps go, this one’s pretty mundane.” She glanced in the direction of the now-empty bus stop, no doubt weighing the potential success of screaming at the top of her lungs. “What do you want?”

He was unsure why she thought he wouldn’t notice her hand creeping behind her back. He put up a cautioning finger. “Ah ah ah. I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

“Do what,” said Barbara, her hand still behind her back.

“Your taser,” said Edward. “You should probably know by now that, oftentimes, one charge doesn’t work. And since you can’t exactly _run_ in the hopes you can outpace me long enough to recharge the taser, all you’re going to do is annoy me terribly. And there’s no need for that.”

“We’ll see,” said Barbara. “You gonna tell me what the point of this is?”

Edward produced a phone from his back pocket and held it out to her. “I want you to call the police.”

She frowned at his hand. “What?”

“Call the police. Tell them I kidnapped you, held you against your will, made you fear for your life, blah blah blah. I don’t care what story you give as long as you do it.”

“And then… ?”

He shrugged. “And then I am arrested.”

“You _want_ to be arrested.”

“That’s right.”

“And… you can’t call the police yourself?”

He laughed airily. “Now now, Miss Gordon. We both know how many people call the GCPD every week, claiming they’re some supervillain or another. No. I need you to do it. They’ll believe you.”

She slowly accepted the phone and made the call. He only half-listened, given the contents of the conversation weren’t that important. On his personal phone he opened the app he’d built which told him the positions of the various cars at the disposal of the GCPD. Usually the ones closest to the position of the call were the ones that got sent, but judging by the GPS signals of the redeployed cars, all three of them were being sent from the precinct itself. _That_ meant Commissioner Gordon was probably _en route_. He had somewhat expected this, but it shouldn’t affect his plans adversely. He took the phone back from Barbara and tucked it again into his back pocket.

“GCPD response time is… twenty minutes. You’ll have to sit tight until then.” He opened the streaming app on the phone and navigated to his desired content, leaning against the wall with one hand in his pocket. He could feel her looking up at him.

“We’re really just going to _wait_ here for twenty minutes?”

“ _You_ are. _I_ am going to watch this hockey game.”

“I’m guessing _I_ can’t use _my_ phone.”

“I really would prefer not to have to do something violent.”

“Okay,” said Barbara. “How about this: you give me that and I hold it so we can _both_ see it.”

“That sounds reasonable,” Edward said, handing it to her. It was a bit farther away than he would have preferred, but if it kept her from trying something it would do. After a few minutes she said,

“I wouldn’t have pegged you for a hockey guy.”

He rolled his eyes. “You wouldn’t be stereotyping me, would you, Miss Gordon?”

“Not exactly,” said Barbara. “But I am curious.”

He decided he was feeling a _little_ conversational. “I used to play in high school.”

This news was apparently somewhat earth-shattering to her, because she put the phone facedown to stare at him in dumbstruck surprise. “If you’re holding it, hold it!” he snapped, and she lifted it up again.

“ _You_ were on a _team_ ,” she said.

“That _is_ how the game is played.” Come to think of it, this turn of events was rather convenient. Now he had both hands free to eat his pretzels. He opened the package and decided it would be polite to offer her one. She stared at it blankly for a few seconds, then said,

“No thanks.”

He shrugged. Her loss.

“Where are they from?”

“The gas station,” Edward answered after he was done chewing. 

“You buy pretzels at the gas station?”

“Sometimes I even buy gas there, too.” He shook his head. Superheroes. “What, do you think there’s a supervillain pretzel store?”

“I’m more interested in the fact that you actually paid for them.”

“You don’t know me very well, Miss Gordon.” Was he a criminal? He could be catergorised as such. Was he a petty thief? Absolutely not.

“You know,” Barbara said after a minute, “if you want protective custody you can just ask.”

“What?” Edward asked, frowning down at his pretzel. He had five left. “Why would I want that?”

Barbara shrugged. “Rumour is that vigilante is after your kind of people. Costumed criminals.”

“That’s the rumour, eh?”

“Mmhm.”

“That’s very interesting,” Edward said, “because none of the information I’ve been receiving from the GCPD has contained anything like that.”

“My dad keeps some things mostly to himself.”

“He shares with you,” Edward said, leaning on the back of the chair, “you share with… _Tim_ , and I laugh because I found out about it a few days before your little knitting circle had begun to put the pieces together. Because no matter how hard you try, my surveillance network is and will always be _exponentially_ better than yours. I do like to keep an ear out, just in case. You know me. Always keeping my bases covered.”

She was looking up at him, one half of her face visible in the cast from the phone. Her eyes were hidden by it, but he already knew her expression would be one of curated blankness. “The network at the GCPD is – “

“Oh, come on,” Edward said. “I know who you are.”

She just continued to look at him.

“You’re probably thinking, ‘Edward, I don’t believe you. If you could listen in on Batman’s communications, you would have done it years ago!’ I _did_ do it years ago. If he were still around, you could have asked him.” He ate the pretzel in his hand before continuing. “But listening in would have been cheating. Now that the game has changed, the previous rules I played by no longer apply. Credit where it’s due: you _are_ better than the average programmer. Almost significantly so. But it would be more arrogant than usual for you to assume you could keep _me_ , who has been working in cyber security since before you could spell, out of your network. You can try again when you get home, though. It will give me something to do when I’m out of lockup.”

“It’s going to go into overtime,” Barbara said, and Edward grimaced.

“I know. Even the GCPD isn’t going to take _that_ long to show up.”

When the notification came in saying the police were three minutes away, Edward took the phone back, sent a text to his informant indicating he was on his way, and activated the dummy OS. He doubted anyone would be able to get into his phone even without that security measure, but no need to make things easy for them. He slipped it back into his pocket and walked the twenty or so metres to deposit the empty pretzel package and second phone in the public trash can, both of which he rubbed against the side of his pants beforehand. It was best to take as little with him as possible to the GCPD. “Well,” he said when the flashing lights began reflecting off of the buildings around them, “it seems our time together has ended.”

“I’m still not sure what the point of it was,” said Barbara. “You could have just surrendered yourself instead of… this.”

“The point isn’t important.” To her, anyway. “Don’t you worry, Miss Gordon. Nothing I’m doing is of any concern to you.”

“So what you’re saying is I should be _extra_ concerned,” Barbara said, but before he could respond the first of the three cars came to a screeching halt in front of them, one of the doors being flung open as it lurched forward due to the abrupt stop.

“Down on your knees!” the officer said, almost before he’d even left the car, and Edward stepped away from the wall and obliged politely, clasping his hands behind his head without being asked. Another officer jumped out of the passenger side and pulled his arms down in order to handcuff him. He’d heard the requisite speech so many times he responded automatically. When that was finished Commissioner Gordon himself exited the second car and looked down at Edward silently from behind partially obscured glasses. 

“He hurt you?” he asked Barbara finally, and she shook her head. He leaned down and pulled the curtain rod out of her wheels. He handed it off to the officer who had cuffed him and stared at Edward again, who had been pulled to standing by an unnecessarily rough hand on his arm. “What do you want?” he asked. Edward shrugged.

“You have warrants out for my arrest, don’t you? Well, here I am.”

“How accommodating of you,” said Gordon. He turned around. “We’ll figure out what he’s up to back at the station.”

As he was directed into the police car he could feel Barbara’s eyes on him. She stopped looking at him only when her father redirected her attention, but it was too dark for him to attempt to read their lips. One of the squad cars headed off on some new assignment, the second one apparently appointed to be Barbara’s chauffeur. Hopefully they hurried up. The sooner he got to the GCPD the sooner he’d be able to leave.

Once Barbara had been taken care of, Commissioner Gordon climbed into the passenger side. He glanced at Edward but did not say anything. Edward looked out of the window. If the informant had not gotten his text this would all go very wrong very quickly. He had, though. All the numbers lined up. This was going to go exactly as he wanted it to.

The booking procedure was as boring and uneventful as ever, except for the part when his gloves were taken and the officer assigned to fingerprint him looked at his hands with such disgusted hesitation that Edward very nearly slapped him. “Just because _you_ have all night doesn’t mean _I_ do,” he snapped, and the officer proceeded so gingerly Edward was sorely tempted to just fingerprint himself to get it over with.

Once that had all been said and done with and Edward had been secured in lockup, Commissioner Gordon appeared again and said, resignation hinted at only in his voice, “I suppose you’d like to call your lawyer.”

Edward smiled without malice. “Absolutely.”

He rubbed at one side of his face, and Edward could agree that the stubble there was getting a little 8long. “I’ll find someone to supervise you,” he said, and went off to presumably do that. Edward took a cursory look around. Things appeared to be no different than they had been the last time he was here. Good. That meant no surprises.

Gordon returned with another officer Edward didn’t know – yet – and pulled a ring of keys out of his pocket. “Don’t touch him,” he advised the other man, pushing the relevant key into the lock and turning it. “His lawyer is…”

“Fantastic,” supplied Edward. “She is fantastic.”

“Yeah,” said Gordon, shaking his head and pulling open the door. 

Once led to the phone and given a stern but misguided warning by the new officer, Edward picked up the receiver using the end of his sleeve pulled over his hand and dialled Sabrina. “Good evening, my dear,” he said when she picked up. She sighed.

“I’m on my way.”

He wiped the receiver down, replaced it, and smiled to himself. Oh yes, this was all going precisely as he had planned. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of the stuff about the pill swallowing is based on me trying to take vitamins (I could only do it for like two days and then I had to give up in favour of gummy vitamins).
> 
> I re-read chapter five a few days ago and saw that I had already mentioned sertraline gave him insomnia nearabouts the end of it; that was a mistake and I have removed it.
> 
> The hockey is going to be relevant later, that’s not me being self-indulgent :)

**Author's Note:**

> Author’s note
> 
> For those of you who don’t know, Edward has three Riddlerbots he sees as his children: Nikola Tesla, who was destroyed when Catwoman blew up the Riddlerbot factory, Alan Turing, who was killed rescuing Jonathan from the GCPD, and Ada Lovelace, whom he sent away temporarily.
> 
> My Jonathan’s backstory includes him struggling in school his whole life, and he was late in learning to read so his spelling is not always great. My Edward is Canadian, half Québécois and half Acadien.
> 
> Because I was asked the last time this happened, this time I do not plan to drop LaaC. The updates will be a little slower but it is not going on hiatus. I just wanted to write this while I know what the tone is. LaaC doesn’t have a through tone so I’m not concerned about losing it.


End file.
